Creating Audio Blog Posts With Public Domain Content

Audio and video are a growing medium. They’re easily accessible, easy to share and for many a better learning option than reading pages of content. Additionally audio and video offer the benefit of allowing your audience to get to know you on a more personal level.

All of these benefits make a very real opportunity to create audio blog posts.

photo credit: Potato Benevolence

Finding Public Domain Audio

Librivox, http://librivox.org/, provides free audio books from the public domain. These audio books can be reused, reformatted, or re-purposed to create top notch audio content for your blogs.

For example, Aesop’s Fables is a popular collection of creative stories created by Greek storyteller with clever and personable animals as the main characters. Each story delivers a moral story. Remember The Tortoise and the Hare? The Boy Who Cried Wolf? The Fox and the Grapes?

Librivox has twelve volumes, that’s 284 fables, recorded and ready for you to use.

Hmmm…how to use them?

You could create downloadable audio files and market them to mother’s who want to raise their children with a strong moral foundation? You could market them to day care facilities.

You could deliver each fable as a podcast or create a cd bundle and sell the whole kit and caboodle as one wonderful product.

Repurpose, reformat or maintain the original?

The next question is whether you keep them exactly as they are or add your own personal touch? If you opt to add your own personal touch to the Librivox recordings there are many software options to help you.

You can of course hire a professional to break the fables and volumes up into predetermined segments. You could add music, your own personal thoughts before or after each fable or even sound effects.

If you’re more of a do-it-yourselfer then there are many wonderful software options including:

Audacity, http://audacity.sourceforge.net/, is an opensource, freeware, program for recording and editing sounds. It’s fairly intuitive to use and you can import and edit a number of sound files including MP3 which is the file type Librivox uses.

Adobe Soundbooth, Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, offers a wide variety of features to make your audio and video editing truly professional. The software price is $199 however they also offer a free trial version.

Dexster Audio Editor, http://www.softdivshareware.com/, has received favorable reviews and runs $40 for the download and it also offers a free trial version.

Aesop’s Fables public domain audio books are a fantastic way to create a wonderful audio blog posts which will also stand the test of time. Parents everywhere have fond memories of Aesop’s Fables and would love to bring them home to their child in a new and modern and easy to use fashion.