How to I-Phone Your Text with Audio

Over the years in submitting stories to Literotica and competing in their Survivor Contest I have noticed that, except for a few gifted writers, the Text with Audio and Poetry with Audio categories have been avoided. This was especially true in the Survivor Contest where I watched contestants sweat out the weekly lottery in the UK hoping to get the two coveted immunities to fill in the Text with Audio and Poetry with Audio slots on their scorecards.

I guess there are several reasons many of the writers avoid these categories. A writer may feel they don't have the voice for presenting their story, or perhaps they have some inhibitions in performing. It is one thing to write some of the exotic and erotic things we do in these stories, it is entirely another to verbalize it out loud. What might be some spicy hushed dialogue in the bedroom does make for some difficult recitation in the home office.

Unfortunately I will have to let you work out those issues by yourself. I am writing to give you some tips that will hopefully help you solve another difficulty in producing the audio files for your Text or Poetry with Audio submission which is how to record your work in a format that Literotica can use. If you visit the FAQ on Literotica they list the basic step by step procedures to follow in submitting a Text or Poetry with Audio story. Their instructions work nicely (at least for the "upload your file" means of submission) but you must first have the file.

Literotica's FAQ indicates that they can handle most any sound format but they prefer WAV, Real Media, Windows Media, or MP3 files. Call me old fashioned but I like to work in WAV files and hey, the sound recorder software on windows had an easy option to save to WAV so that's what I did. Later, when I purchased a voice recorder it also saved to WAV so I just kept using it. Window's current sound recorder, well at least the one in Windows 7 saves to a Windows Media (WMA) format which should be compatible however you must have a microphone hooked up to your computer.

Well, quite frankly, I was too lazy to chase down my microphone and since I wanted to limit the background noise from using the one in my monitor I decided to give my I-phone a try. I mean it has a sound recorder and hey, I used it to sketch some of the drawings I've submitted on my illustrated stories so why not?

I had a couple of short poems I wanted to submit so I quickly read them into the I-Phone and then emailed the recording to myself. Downloading the files I immediately noticed it saved them to a M4A file type. I'm not a Techie so I didn't immediately recognize this as an MP4 file. Either way, I wasn't sure if Literotica could handle MP4 files so I tried to covert it using the software I had on hand which was Windows Sound Recorder, Windows Media Player and I-Tunes. Well, none of those had any obvious means of converting the M4A file. They played it fine but I couldn't find a way to convert it to something I was sure Literotica could handle.

When all else fails I do what everyone else does, I google. Sure enough right at the top of the page I spotted several free downloads and holding my breath I picked one (ConverterLite v1.6.2) and downloaded it. Well in just a few moments Norton flashed a pop-up informing me the download was safe. Now when you go to download this pay attention because the download comes bundled with a lot of toolbars and browser stuff. You can easily decline any or all of these offers and still get what you need.

The install is quick and all you have to do is open the program, select the file you want, select the type of file you want to convert to (WAV in my case) and then simply click on finish. The file can be saved anywhere or you can simply let it default to where your original M4A file was located. Once you have the file converted all you've got to do is go to Literotica's FAQ under multimedia submissions and follow instructions to upload the audio file. You then submit the text portion of the submission as you would any other non-audio story but make sure you do reference the audio file you uploaded in the comment box for your submission.

There you go, with just an I-Phone, some free converter software and Literotica you can easily submit your Text with Audio stories or Poetry with Audio poems.