If you have ever found anything useful for free on the internet, consider giving something back to the community. I recently found out about Librivox -- an all volunteer project to provide audio of public domain literature. Librivox is the natural audio follow-on to the Gutenberg project, from which all their readings are sourced. It's funny how I heard about Librivox the same day I just spent the afternoon with a 100% blind person.

In Librivox, you sign up, and decide whether you want to read or edit. If you decide to read, you record and upload mp3 files of your chapters or poems or whatever they've got going, and your voice becomes part of the Legacy. They've even got collaborative readings of plays. I don't envy those editors having to slice and dice the individual lines and equalize the background noise and voice levels and so on. There is abundant documentation at Librivox, so I won't burden you with any more verbiage. The community is friendly, great, and very supportive.

I signed up and figured out how to charge and use the digital voice recorder. I eventually uploaded my test recording, and the experienced editors there gave me very useful technical suggestions for masking or eliminating fan noise, but I think I'll just pop the texts up on the laptop so there won't be any. Why do an extra step if you don't have to?

I've completed my first assignment, a little old-fashioned nature story for children called "62 tadpoles". I chose it because I loved to watch tadpoles grow into little brown toads when I was a child. After I've done a few easier recordings I'd love to try out for a play.

If you want to volunteer as a reader or editor I believe that Librivox is very worthwhile project.

Here is a Youtube video with an audio version of more information on libribox. The video portion is very boring, this might as well have been pure audio. This is not my voice nor my recording, but it was put there to be spread around, and I'm spreading the word. This recording clips a little on the sibilants and it probably should have been smoothed out, but we are all volunteers.