Since last detailed post about recording narration for your eLearning projects, additional discussions have brought about a few more ideas, notes, and resources.

Here’s a nice post (and a great overall eLearning site) by Connie Malamed. In brief, she lists her suggestions on ‘Best Stock Music for Multimedia Projects’ where “you will find online providers of stock music and sound effects (SFX). These sites offer pricing and tracks suitable for online learning, videos, presentations and other multimedia projects.”

An additional, newer resource is eLearning Brothers, who have recently jumped into stock media offering “over 500,000 stock photos, graphics, vectors, videos and audio files to the training and development community.” One thing they point out, which should always be a concern, is proper licensing. Per the eLearning Brothers post, “One thing that really differentiates this offering is that our customers don’t have to worry about complex licensing models that charge extra if an image is used incorrectly. Once it is part of their course, they keep the asset forever.”

While discussing eLearning Brothers, they have a nice tip on eliminating background noise with a video showing the process with both Audition and Audacity. Adobe’s Audition is a solid audio editing tool but the free Audacity is a strong competitor. In fact, rarely do I fire up the more resource-hungry Audition when a quick Audacity record/edit works just as well.

Moving on from eLearning Brothers, Rick Zanotti has a straightforward guest post on IconLogic’s blog with general suggestions on how to make your narration more compelling.

In a related theme, Christy Tucker has a great series of posts on voiceover scripts in Three Parts!

• Voice-Over Scripts: Writing Style Tips
• Formatting Tips for Voice-Over Scripts
• Voice-Over Script Pitfalls

And we can’t forget about mobile! Techsmith has an article on 13 Tips for Recording Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod. Though while unfortunately iOS-specific, such processes are good to be aware of! And, of course, if you want to record audio on your Android device, there are plenty of related options in the Play Store.

Finally, a discussion on LinkedIn asking for recommendations for “a High-Quality Audio Recording Headset for Screencasting on a Mac OS X?” prompted a reference to that earlier eLearning Chef post, as well as a nice discussion on preferences. To test out our equipment, I posted a sample narrative using a Plantronics headset on our Recipes page, and  Ellen Brodsky put up her Logitech headset and a BluSnoball results on her site. Maybe you’re enough of an audiophile to find a strong preference!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on audio and narration quality and recording tips, hardware preferences, etc. in our comments!