Dave Courvoisier's Blog
Voice-Acting in Vegas
All-In-One
If I've been asked once, I've been asked a thousand times: "How do you keep up with all the Social Media channels, Dave?" I've never actually worried about that myself. I. just. do. But I realize not everyone is as afflicted as me...they just want to get the most they can out of their social networks...not LIVE on them. Thanks to Tokyo-based voice-actor Mark Weitzman, I got a tip about an online service just out of "beta" that may be what you're looking for. Alternion.com lets … [Read More...]
MixWerk
Germany. Home of the Fraunhofer mp3 algorithm, Steinberg audio, and Neumann microphones. Now add MixWerk Studios, Berlin to your Deutsche dictionary. MixWerk showed up on my radar, when the founder — Uwe Engel — posted a complimentary comment to an article on my blog. Not having heard of MixWerk, I began a brief email correspondence [...]
Advice Advantage
“Pay-it-Forward” became a cliché the day after the movie of the same name was released. But no one’s come up with a better way to briefly phrase the ethic that extending value IN ADVANCE of reward, holds great promise as a lifestyle, a marketing plan, and a business plan. I try to live by that [...]
SoundCloud Grows Up
“The YouTube site for Sound”…that’s what some are calling SoundCloud these days. The Berlin-based company launched in 2008, and now has 10-million users…and has just raised 50-million in venture capital funding. From an article on TechCrunch: Soundcloud “…has had over five million official SoundCloud iphone/android apps downloaded and over 10,000 third party apps have been [...]
Social Media & VO
Not many cultural developments have been as ground-breaking as sliced bread. Still, some of some of you say you like to visit here ’cause I’m always throwing out new “stuff” that I find. It could be reviews of new equipment, but often it’s Web Tools I discover that I think might be helpful to your [...]
Murky Merger Murmurs
The neat freak inside me wants the proposed SAG/AFTRA merger to succeed. I dislike wasteful duplication, gratuitous redundancy, and top-heavy bureaucracies. I’ve been told talk of a merger has been around about as long as the proposal for a high-speed train between Las Vegas and LA — decades. On the surface, the latest proposed merger [...]
Got Chops?
The SAG Foundation Don LaFontaine Voice Over Lab is seeking an administrator. Here’s what Lab Co-Founder and LA-based VO Pro Joe Cipriano writes on VU: Joe Cipriano 5:30pm Jan 19 http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/Jobs/JobDetails.aspx?job_did=J3T51W64T1QHMVF6DFQHello Voice Over friends and colleagues. As one of co-founders of the Don LaFontaine Voice over LAB, I am extremely excited to tell you about [...]
Big Files & a Chrome Tip
They keep getting bigger, those files. Docs. .Wav files…even a bunch of mp3′s can take up space. I’ve blogged about this before…in fact my “22+ Ways to Send Large Files” is one of my all-time most popular articles. But…you know…things change and new stuff comes up…so let me tell you about a new one I [...]
THIS SITE ON STRIKE…
…in support of a protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) See my blog explaining this. Now, visit this site to lend your support. Now, visit this site to pressure your elected representatives in Washington, D.C. CourVO
List ‘O ‘Leven Latest Links
The new year finally woke up! So much VO stuff flying around in the matrix, and this blog lists a bunch of ‘em…for my own notebooking if nothing else. ‘Hope you find something here you may not have seen yet. ONE: SAG and AFTRA say they’re closer to a merger. This is the result of [...]
The VO Success Pyramid
…Lets make that the (PERCEIVED) VO Success Pyramid… ‘Defined as a hierarchical representation of the levels of work/success/challenge/acknowledgement/accomplishments traditionally accepted as reasonably desirable in our field. By nature, the pyramid is tiered from lowest-paying and least prestigious to the best-paying and highest profile jobs available to the voice actor. OK, Dave, but why?…why put it [...]
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Doing WaterMarks Right
Grats to my social media partner and VO pro Terry Daniel for directing me to the following video posted on his VoiceOver Club site. Fellow Voice Actor Mike Elmore makes an easy-to-follow explanation about watermarking your auditions. Also, be watching for an upcoming podcast on the Voices.com Expert Series regarding Social Media. Recording it with [...]
Conversion
Just give me the word count willya? Give me a word count, and I can pretty much decide a lot of things: time-to-complete-narrration, time-to-complete-editing, my cost, YOUR cost…a lot. And you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to get the word count. I mean, just about everybody uses MS Word in one form another, [...]
Storify
Maybe you’ve already heard of this, but I hadn’t, and Storify is one. slick. tool. You know how sometimes you want to pull a quote, or even a whole tweet from Twitter, but capturing screen shots just isn’t doin’ the trick? Or even a FaceBook post? Storify takes care of that. With the Storify interface, [...]
Beat the Noise
Michael Minetree is churnin’ out the videos these days. I meant to get this particular video posted on my blog before I left for FaffCon. (this is why people ask me “When do you sleep?”). Believe me, a week later it still offers plenty about how to eliminate noise in noisy environments as you use [...]
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Not VoiceOver
I have an iPhone. I also have a rant about iPhone…well, actually the rant is about a misguided misnomer that’s gaining momentum in regards to a new iPhone 3GS feature. LOVE the iPhone! Love the new 3GS…it comes with a VoiceControl feature that lets you press a button, call out a name, and the [...]
All a-Buzz
Google continues to amaze. After the many years experiencing Microsoft’s marketplace moves, I keep thinking there’s a catch…a string attached. Google is no Boy Scout, but it’s hard to argue with the value of all the free stuff they throw at you. Lately, I find myself using the Google Chrome browser more and more for [...]
Speak Text For Me
The issue of Synthetic Voices has garnered as much or more attention on this blog as any other one topic. There are unique challenges and advantages in this area to the voice actor. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, a little backstory: I’ve blogged about this at least 6 times in recent years: [...]
SoundCloud Grows Up
“The YouTube site for Sound”…that’s what some are calling SoundCloud these days. The Berlin-based company launched in 2008, and now has 10-million users…and has just raised 50-million in venture capital funding. From an article on TechCrunch: Soundcloud “…has had over five million official SoundCloud iphone/android apps downloaded and over 10,000 third party apps have been [...]
22+ Ways to Send Large Files
10-hour long AudioBooks? 40-module E-Learning projects? 100-slide PowerPoint Presentation? Oh, and did I mention, the client wants all the finished production in .wav files? You know…the best quality, and the BIGGEST size? Today’s Voice talent has to be a whiz at sending big audio files with dependability, ease, and speed. You may have already [...]
Wonder Wheel
Did you know that Google just recently took Gmail out of Beta? After years of usage by millions of people…FINALLY, it’s an official Google application. Google, and especially Gmail has been on my radar a lot lately. Without going into the reasons, suffice it to say that the deeper I dive, the more impressed I [...]
CourVO Droid App Launches!
Fast on the heels of last week’s launch of the CourVO iPhone/iPad app comes today’s release of the CourVO Android App…good for all Droid smartphones and tablets. You can download the CourVO app from the Droid marketplace. Or just go to the Marketplace from your Droid device, and use the search term: COURVO. Now, this [...]
22+ Ways to Send Large Files
10-hour long AudioBooks? 40-module E-Learning projects? 100-slide PowerPoint Presentation? Oh, and did I mention, the client wants all the finished production in .wav files? You know…the best quality, and the BIGGEST size? Today’s Voice talent has to be a whiz at sending big audio files with dependability, ease, and speed. You may have already [...]
6 Cool Usable Tools
My list-making gene is expressing itself again. Part of the reason is that the News Director in my newsroom (ahem…my boss) asked me to compile some online journalism search tools for my colleagues. In the process, I found all sorts of resources that anyone — Yes, even voice actors — could use to their advantage [...]
7 Simple CRM Solutions
CRM: Customer Relationship Management Not that your customers or your relationships need “managing”…it’s just a term that applies to any number of available software systems that help you track, communicate with, and…well…manage your contacts, clients, friends, potential customers, and business associates in all sorts of creative ways. I realize that many of you may not need such [...]
AudioEloquence
How have I missed this one till now??!! AudioEloquence seems to be the Holy Grail of pronunciation-help sites. It claims to be the “Research and Pronunciation Site for AudioBook Narrators”…but this resource seems to have it all, and would be a great aid to any VO project. Linguistic Tools, Translators, Dictionaries, Interactive Reference works…and on [...]
Big Files & a Chrome Tip
They keep getting bigger, those files. Docs. .Wav files…even a bunch of mp3′s can take up space. I’ve blogged about this before…in fact my “22+ Ways to Send Large Files” is one of my all-time most popular articles. But…you know…things change and new stuff comes up…so let me tell you about a new one I [...]