Aldoblog

I just watched the full video from yesterday’s introduction of the Apple iPad, and had a few thoughts. If you have seen other Apple product introductions, the format is familiar, and they are never less than well executed. Of the intros I’ve seen, nothing has come close to the introduction of the iPhone. (I saw […]

Recorded Books is offering a dozen audiobook apps in the iTunes Store, audiobooks built into an app for playing them on an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app is intended to make acquiring and listening to an audiobook easier and less frustrating. In some ways it succeeds.

Bookmark is an alternative audio player app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is specifically for use with audiobooks, based on the insight that the iPod is great for music, but not very well-suited to audiobooks. Bookmark was designed around the central concept that, when listening to a long audiobook, you want different controls for moving around in the much longer tracks, and tools for marking positions in the recording that go beyond just saving where you left off.

Researching the answer to a reader question, I came across the following article in Apple’s Knowledgebase, and it’s so generally useful, I thought I mention it: It covers the most basic information about how to sync audio from iTunes to your iPod or iPhone, but that’s often the best place to start when you have […]

Just a quick note to mention that Audiobook Builder, my preferred solution for creating audiobooks on Mac OS X, was recently updated to version 1.1. The improvements include: Longer audiobook parts, 18 hours instead of the prior 12 hour limit. New options for where to break an audiobook into parts; for me, this means no […]

Barnes & Noble is giving away nine free audiobooks. Most of the selections are short stories, but Tom Sawyer is the full length novel. All are offered in MP3 format, which should be playable on any device. (With iTunes 8 you can change the media type to Audiobook to make tracks in any format behave […]

After posting my explanation of Nearly Perfect Audiobooks, I got feedback from a number of readers who preferred to have their audiobooks in lots of short, 1-3 minute tracks. I find many tracks to be incredibly annoying when organizing and managing my books, especially when manually creating a “Listen Now” playlist to compliment the smart […]

Once your iPod or iPhone recognizes a track as an audiobook (see FAQ #1 for details), you have the ability to speed up or slow down the playback of the track. For people looking to power through a book (say, while driving to your book club), speeding up playback can be useful. For language learning, […]

It’s an older article, but Slate Magazine has a terrific piece about the importance of narration in the quality of audiobooks, from hard boiled fiction to urban sociology. Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt is subtitled “When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong,” and gives examples of the three most common — and easily avoided — […]

This is an overview of my current process for importing audiobooks. It’s a preview of my forthcoming (no, really, I promise) update to my instructions for importing audiobooks from CDs into iTunes. For OCD types, anal-retentives, and Harry Potter fans (hello brothers and sisters!), this preview may be sufficient for you to follow along on […]