I’ve often saved folks at the last minute
From committing this heinous act
This is probably the most asked question I get.
Of course, there are also countless times I’ve talked to someone just before they are about to commit this catastrophic mistake.
But Rob, if audio is supposed to be so internet friendly, what’s the rub? And don’t all those monthly audio services say you can send audio by email?
Well, audio is internet friendly.
However, sending it by email is as egregious as sending an email in all caps.
And here’s why:
Regular uncompressed audio (like the songs on your CDs) take up an enormous amount of space, around 10 MB per minute. (Holy cow!) But I know you’re sayin’ “Hey, but that’s why they invented MP3’s, right?”
Well yes and no.
MP3 is a compression scheme that shrinks your audio so that its downloadable. And if your message is short . . . 2 minutes or less . . . you could probably get away with sending it as an attachment. The problem is most folks want to send segments that are much longer. 20 minutes . . . 40 minutes . . . an hour or longer.
And here you’re talkin’ trouble.
Number one . . . most beginning audio producers don’t compress their MP3s as much as they could. So they’re still a lot bigger than they need to be. And even if they did compress it completely, you’re still looking at over 10 MB per hour of audio.
And yep, while 50% of your friends and colleagues have high speed access, download speeds on 10MB files are still not instantaneous.
And if you’re like me, most of the time when you’re checking your email you want to get in and out quickly. And I can guarantee that making someone wait a couple minutes for your audio file to crawl into their inbox before they can view the rest of their email is not going to make you their favorite person.
I can’t count the times I’ve been halfway out the door to dinner or a meeting, and had to wait to check my email before I left because some yokel decided to send a massive audio or graphics file as an attachment.
There are other reasons as well:
- People are paranoid of the virus potential of any email attachment, and will ax yours without a second thought.
- Many ISPs have a limit on the size of files you can send as attachments. So there’s a good chance your file will be intercepted by their filters and zapped into infinity (and beyond!)
- And finally, there’s still a good number of folks out there who simply don’t know what to do with audio attached to email.
But don’t services like Audio Acrobat say that you can send your audio via email?
That’s what they say. But here’s how those services actually work.
You don’t actually send the audio in the email. You send something called an Audio Note or Audio Postcard that contains a link that opens a web page and streams the audio through your web browser. So the email doesn’t contain the audio, but links to a web page that does.
So . . .
. . . lets say you don’t have a streaming audio service . . . and you don’t know how to create an audio download page on your website. Or you don’t want to pay your web designer to create one every time you have a file to send.
Can you get a large audio file to a client or customer?
You sure can!
And in our next tip we’ll talk about a service that allows you to do just that. And better yet, it won’t cost you a dime.
