Current Version: 2.0, released Jan 19, 2016 – download AudioScripter 2.0

Introduction

AudioScripter is a little piece of free software I wrote to help format scripts for audio dramas. It takes a plain text file and produces a super-useful html file.

Here are some benefits of recording using a script produced by AudioScripter:

Scrolling a screen is quieter for a voice actor to do than shuffle paper – and everybody has a laptop, tablet, or smartphone these days.

Script is easy to read on any device. pdfs and doc files almost always require horizontal scrolling/zooming on phones and tablets.

It is easy to distribute, either via email or by putting it in a dropbox’s public folder.

You can restrict a script to show only one scene at a time.

You can highlight a character’s part, so an actor can quickly pick out his or her lines.

Easy to give direction to actors, as scenes and cues are automatically numbered.

Example

I will give directions for working with your plain text file in a moment, but first let me show you an example of how AudioScripter works. I’m using a script I got from the generic radio workshop. It’s an episode of the hardest boiled show ever, Pat Novak, For Hire. I did minor formatting changes to the text and added scene breaks.

AudioScripter Text Files

The text format AudioScripter needs is quite simple. Here are the rules:

At the top of your script on the first line type the title.

Next line down put the subtitle or byline.

You can add as many lines as you want to this “top of the script” information.

Leave a blank line after the top of script stuff – this tells the program to start looking for scenes and cues.

Start a new scene with “SCENE:” at the beginning of a line. Anything after the colon on that line will be the scene title/description

New cues start with a line in all capitol letters with the character’s name.

FX and MUSIC are entered in just like a character.

You put asterisks around text to give it emphasis.

You add in stage directions by putting them in parentheses.

Other than the first blank line (that signals the end of the title area) blank lines are ignored.

Start a line with a pound sign ‘#’ if you want AudioScripter to leave it out of the exported script.

To see these rules in use, just check out the example script I mentioned above.

My favorite plain text editors are:

But there are a slew of plain text editors for free for all platforms.

Distributing a Script

Once you have written your script, you can distribute it to your actors/crew in a number of ways. You can load the script into AudioScripter, then export it. AudioScripter will spit out a html file. You can either send the html file as an attachment to anyone who needs it, or you can sign up for Dropbox, then put the script in your public folder. Once the script is in your dropbox public folder, you can right click on it (in windows) and click “copy public link” then paste the link into an email or a blog post. It’ll come up like any other web page.

Or you could send the text file to your cast and crew and tell them to download audioscripter, but I think the html file is a more elegant solution.

Screenshots

I guess I have to add screenshots at some point.

Download

You’ll need to install the adobe air framework first.

Future Plans

I may build a version that is a WriteMonkey plugin.

Version 1

I have changed things dramatically from the first version of the program. The biggest change is that AudioScripter no longer has any text editing capabilities. I also dropped support for encrypting the script. I have my reasons for doing this.

So, if you still want to use Version 1, that’s fine I guess, and you can download it here.

Version History

2015-01-19 v 2.0

All new everything. Rebuilt from the ground up, cuz it works better with my workflow.

No more editing.

Watches the open file for changes and automatically updates.

Added scene chooser that can show only one scene at a time.

Better looking exports.

Added character list for each scene.

Added character list for whole script.

2013-09-08 v0.1.1

minor graphical changes

testing to make sure the automatic updates work

2013-09-07 v0.1.0