Boot Me Up, Scotty! How To Get Your Demos To Load Faster
By Stephanie Ciccarelli
January 14, 2010
How can you get more clients to listen to your demos?
Wouldn't it help if the audio itself played a role in championing your cause?
Learn more about how you can make your demos ultra attractive and more easily listened to here at Voices.com.
Why Do Some Demos Take Longer To Play?
File Size
Mainly it's to do with the file size. If a file is larger it will take longer to load in the player, thus it takes longer to play. At Voices.com we place great emphasis on presenting quality audio and allow you to upload files without any compression or manipulation of your audio. While this is a wonderful and authentic way to present audio, it also opens the door for larger files to take longer to load.
Internet Connection
Another chief factor, which is entirely out of your control, is the quality of the Internet connection the client has.
Memory and Bandwidth
In a similar vein, the client may be multitasking on their computer while they are listening. Download speed is determined in part by the activities a person is performing at the moment of download.
For instance, someone could be running software upgrades, doing computer maintenance, be using a number of applications or have multiple tabs and windows open in their Internet browser. There is only so much memory and bandwidth to go around.
Hope!
There are things you can do to help combat these hurdles to make your demo load faster or be worth waiting for.
How To Minimize Downloading Time:
๠Make sure your demo is an MP3 file
๠Encode all MP3s you upload to Voices.com at 128kbps
๠Keep your demos to 60 seconds or less
Reference: 1 minute of stereo digital audio, encoded at 128kbps = 1 MB MP3 file.
Making Your Demo Worth The Wait
๠Properly name and tag your demos
๠Include a voice age for each demo
๠Give a detailed description of what the file contains content wise
Any Other Ideas?
I hope what I've shared has helped and am interested to hear how you personally strive toward making your demo attractive and worth the wait.
Looking forward to your reply,
Stephanie
©iStockphoto.com/Karina Tischlinger
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This is very useful.
Posted by:Thanks for sharing this very useful information.
Posted by:Bonnie Engel Lee
Hi Stephanie--
Posted by:I love all the information that you send out on VOX Daily.
Something that would really help me would be if you could
put what the subject of the piece is in the subject line instead
of just Vox Daily.
So like for this e-mail if you put "Vox Daily-How to load demos faster," it really helps me in my filing system.
Just a quirky little comment, but I think it would really help the viewer.
Thanks for all the great info...
Debbe
Hi Debbe,
thank you for commenting. Great question! From what I understand, Google (who owns FeedBurner, the service we use to deliver VOX Daily to our subscribers with) does not allow the subject line to auto-populate with the title of a given blog posting.
I understand where you are coming from and hope that we can find a way to make this possible in the future.
Best wishes,
Stephanie
Posted by: