Every once in a while someone writes a really nice blog comment about LibriVox. This is one:

In tangential news, we’ve upped production approximately 6000% in the past couple weeks, with a couple neat discoveries.
First of all, http://librivox.org is a free source for public domain recordings of public domain books. Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I likes me some literature, and all the sudden here’s all the Twain, Dickens, Wodehouse, and Thoreau you’ll need to keep you busy for a good while. You got’cher Oscar Wilde, yer Leo Tolstoy, and yer H.G. Wells. Edgar Rice Borroughs brings us the amazing Tarzan books, there’s Dr. Dolittle, Sherlock Holmes, and a hefty lot of Oz books. I’m pretty sure Mr. Armadillo is quite (Plato!) through with hearing me randomly (Tom Swift!) shouting out nice finds throughout the last week or so (Dostoyevsky!).

I love to have an audiobook running while I work. It keeps my mind busy and I love to spend an afternoon tuned into a reading while making neat things. Audiobooks are hard to come by, though. They’re pricey to buy, and it’s hard for me to get them back to the library on time. Plus, our little branch has a pretty dismal selection, and the good ones can be hard to get ahold of. Finding LibriVox is like I’ve suddenly fallen into this amazing treasure trove, I can’t even adequately describe how tickled I am over the whole thing.

I’ve already signed up to volunteer a reading, and I’ve got a really neat little collection of very old children’s and young adult literature that will be fun to share, most are about dogs or horses or general adventure-type stuff, pirates and shipwrecks. If you know anyone with a Scottish accent that would be willing to do a reading, I have copies of Bob, Son of Battle and Greyfriars Bobby that I would give a great deal to hear properly read.

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WHAT IS IT? pdsounds is like LibriVox for audio-other-than-text. Go there to find recordings of babies sneezing, cats purring and fireworks exploding. It’s all dedicated to the public domain, and therefore is available for people to use in all sorts of ways. Sounds from there make regular appearances in my LibriVox Community Podcasts, for example!

TAKE THE PDSOUNDS CHALLENGE!

A database of sounds is only as good as the sounds it contains. It needs more. LibriVoxers, by definition, tend to be audio-aware people, and many have microphones that could be turned away from the reader briefly to catch another noise. Or just upload your yawns, giggles and coughs as you snip them out of recordings!

BRONZE LEVEL: pledge to contribute one recording during May to pdsounds. Most files there are short (5-30 seconds) and are simple sounds. Every LibriVoxer with a microphone could do this. There is no sound too mundane!

SILVER LEVEL: pledge to contribute one recording a week. Come ON, the moment a yappy dog or low-flying plane interrupts your chapter, that’s your week’s contribution recorded!

GOLD LEVEL: aiming to upload a sound a day!

More info on the challenge, at the LV forum.

More info on PDsounds at PDsounds.