There are five recordings, one for each part of the book. They are copyright Ben Gadd, 2020. All rights reserved.
You can use the playlist to listen without waiting for downloading. Or if you want to download, you’ll find that farther down the page. You may do so at no charge, for your own personal use or for use in school. The recordings are not for any commercial use without Ben’s permission.
Playlist
Individual recordings to download:
You can use the playlist to listen without waiting for downloading. Or if you want to download, you’ll find that farther down the page. You may do so at no charge, for your own personal use or for use in school. The recordings are not for any commercial use without Ben’s permission.
Grandpa Ben reads Raven’s End 2020 part 1, 50 MB
Grandpa Ben reads Raven’s End 2020 part 2, 54 MB
Grandpa Ben reads Raven’s End 2020 part 3, 133 MB
Grandpa Ben reads Raven’s End 2020 part 4, 104 MB
Grandpa Ben reads Raven’s End 2020 part 5, 95 MB
Technical information
The readings were done by Ben Gadd, the book’s author. They total 15.4 hours. (The book length is 359 pages.)
Recording was done in March of 2019 at Ben’s home in Canmore, Alberta, Canada. He used a Zoom H2N digital recorder.
Ben likes to read aloud and has read from Raven’s End at many author visits to schools in Alberta and British Columbia since the novel was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2001. Several times he has read the whole book in a series of sessions to classes of grade fives and sixes in Canmore. The audio-book version benefits from that experience.
Still, these were not in-studio readings done by a professional actor, as is typically the case with commercial audio books. These are home recordings made by a person seventy-three years old. But the sound is clear and the background noise is minimal.
The original WAV audio files were assembled and edited by Ben in the spring of 2020, completion date April 14th. Originally recorded in stereo, the files were converted to monaural, which is fine for a single voice and reduces the file size by half. Noise reduction and equalization were used to provide the clearest, most intelligible sound.
MPEG Audio Layer III file compression (MP3) was employed at a bit rate of 64 kilobytes per second. This reduced the files to less than ten percent of their original size without much loss in fidelity.
The audio editor Ben used for all this work was Ocenaudio, which was surprisingly easy for him to learn. The program performed very well. Like its less-friendly big brother Audacity, Ocenaudio is freeware. It was developed in Brazil as part of the Ocen Framework. Ben recommends it highly.
─ 26 Apr 2020