Interviews, Audio Editing Headaches & 500 Buyers

This morning I interviewed Mark Thompson (the one in Marbella) about his 500 Buyers report. Hello Mark if you’re reading this! *waves*

Listen to the interview below:

Mark Thompson Interview

Mark interviewed me too. To be honest, I was a little bit terrified but once we got going it wasn’t too bad, although I messed up Mark’s intro somewhat…

But that’s what audio editors are for… More about that later.

I thought I was going to have to buy Pamela for Skype or Supertintin to record the interview, but my motto is why pay for something you can get for free?

So I’m proud to say that I got it all done with free tools with no compromise in quality! What a happy bunny I am! 🙂

So the interview was conducted over skype and I used a program called MP3 Skype Recorder

During testing it didn’t seem to want to record my side of the conversation, which would kinda make the interview a bit one-sided, lol! But after playing around with the settings, selecting Mono recording mode seemed to do the trick. Since an interview really only needs to me mono, there’s no problem there and the sound quality cannot be faulted.

So, with both sides of the interview done, I now had a raw mp3 file which needed a bit of editing…

So I downloaded a free open source program called Audacity. It’s for Windows, Mac and even Linux 🙂

Editing an audio file sounds simple enough, right?

Well it is once you know what you’re doing. But figuring out what to do took some time…

Maybe it’s in the manual, I don’t know, but not being one to read manuals I decided to figure it out for myself. And I made my brain hurt in the process.

So, I re-recorded the intro in several parts, taking rather more than a few attempts to get roughly the same volume and intonation as the interview.

Then I just needed to trim out the bits I wanted to get rid of and insert the bits I wanted to replace them with.

Now if I’d known what I was doing, I’d just have left gaps where I’d removed bits and then it would have been a lot simpler. But I don’t like to make things easy for myself, lol!

In Audacity, rather than being able to just insert the bits you want, rather like a Word processor, you have to add extra tracks, which run concurrently… which means you need to “generate silence” in the appropriate places of some tracks, so they are playing silence while the sound on the current one is allowed through. This means they don’t all overlap each other and become totally intelligible. I hope that makes sense!

So after a lot of trial and error, you can listen to the finished interview with Mark here:

Mark Thompson Interview

Mark does things a lot differently to most email marketers and he gets 30% email open rates, which is pretty much unheard of in the Internet Marketing niche, so when he speaks it pays to listen!

Mark’s 500 Buyers report goes into further detail about his business model and how he turns email marketing and listbuilding on its head and is well worth a read.

Click here to download Mark’s 500 buyers report

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