Teridon’s Audiobook Helper

I have not yet tested it with importing a book, but it looks like it gets a couple of things really right, namely allowing you to set the meta data for the tracks manually, overriding what comes in from the Gracenote CDDB lookup that iTunes does automatically, and which is often inaccurate. Bogus meta data is one of the top causes for problems that people have with sort and playback order of audiobook tracks, and if this tool can reduce or eliminate that, it’s going to be very useful indeed.

When listening to audiobooks, you of course want both Repeat and Shuffle turned off. On standard iPods, you do this in the main settings menu, and it’s effective for all tracks. But on the iPhone, as Dan explains and illustrates, the setting is harder to find, until you know where it is, and can be turned on and off while fiddling with your place in a track. See Dan’s full post for the details.

Take my book. It’s free. Giving away books as podcasts is new way to promote sales.

The basic idea is, the author reads their novel a chunk at a time, recording it, and publishing the recordings on a regular, sequential basis. A chapter a week is a common pattern. Interested listeners can download the recordings and listen to them on their computer, iPod, whatever. For free.

The best news is that iTunes can make receiving the periodic recordings totally automatic. Once you subscribe to the author’s podcast, the chapters will be downloaded automatically as published, and can even be automatically transferred to your iPod. Very slick.

The article has more details about the hows and whys, including references to the podcasts for several authors who got started podcasting, but are now professionally published, so it’s not just “hey, look at this cool technology” informative, it’s also got direct links to new authors and books for you to check out.

For a non-technology writer (she’s a novelist), it’s a remarkably clear explanation of what DRM is, and why Random House is dropping it, along with what it means to her as an author.

From the general perspective of audiobook lovers, what it means is that there will be more online options from which to download audiobooks, at least the ones published by Random House. I don’t expect this to change my recommendation of Audible.com, at least not in the short run. In the long run, if it exposes more people to audiobooks, and sales volumes grow, then perhaps it will result in lower prices, too.

Update: Grant’s rant in Not books too! is an entirely different perspective on the announcement, gloom and doom, and fairly representative of old school thinking. He seems to not have actually read the release he copies verbatim into his post, which clearly stated that Random House had not found the for-pay, no DRM versions of audiobooks on piracy sites, i.e., eliminating DRM wasn’t increasing theft of audiobooks.

Maybe that will change when more sites offer them as downloads, but I suspect not. People who are going to steal are going to steal. People who just want more audiobooks will steal, occasionally, but only as long as it’s more convenient than not stealing, i.e., buying legitimate copies of books. Look at the growth of the iTunes Store for music, rising to the #2 seller of music in the world, and on their way to #1 before the end of the year. There are more people downloading from the iTunes Store than there are downloading stolen music.

Make it convenient, and reasonably priced, and people will pay for content.

I’m still waiting for a deluxe boxed set of all the audiobooks, like the deluxe print books set, but if you’re just looking for a great deal on a complete set, packaging be damned, here’s all seven Harry Potter audiobooks at Amazon.com, at a 40% discount from full retail.

It’s still $275, but considering what they cost individually, if you want to own all seven, this is the way to go. The total running time is almost five days — at under $2.50/hour, it’s hard to imagine a better value for your entertainment dollar. Enjoy!

Want crime reports for your neighborhood? Got ‘em. Want restaurant inspection reports? Got ‘em. Want reviews of local establishments on Yelp? Got ‘em. They compile standard news outlets, public records, other local sites, and even geo-tagged Flickr photos.

Go to the site, type in your street address, and then spend the next hour (or more) browsing the different pieces of information available. This is seriously interesting. I think in the long run it’ll be as influential as craigslist.

(I have no affiliation with EveryBlock, I just figure that everyone has an interest in what’s happening in their neighborhood, and this looks like a compelling way to find out.)

This post isn’t a thorough tutorial on how to accomplish this, merely an expansion of the existing FAQ on the subject. There are all kinds of extra details you might want to consider if you’re as anal retentive as I am about getting all those details “right.” Still, this should give you most of what you would want to know.

For Windows Users

If you are using iTunes on Windows, there is a free tool called MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter that will allow you to take a collection of MP3 tracks, and do two things:

• Merge the tracks into a single, long track.
• Convert the track from MP3 to AAC, and change the file type to make iTunes consider it an audiobook.

There are some limitations. First, you need to start with your audiobook tracks in MP3 format, not AAC format as my instructions recommend. Just choose the MP3 encoder when you set your iTunes import settings, instead of AAC, before you import your audiobooks. Second, the tool does not add chapter marks in between the tracks. It’s one long track. While iTunes and your iPod will save your place, allow you to speed up or slow down playback, and let you scrub through the track, there’s no navigating by chapters, i.e., clicking forward or backward to skip to the next chunk.

For Mac Users

If you are a Mac OS X user, you have two options, one free and very good, one $10 and outstanding. First the free Join Together AppleScript application put together by Doug Adams of Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.

I’ve written about Join Together previously, so I’ll keep this to the pluses and minuses. On the plus side:

• It works within iTunes (with a separate application for entering audiobook information).
• It handles AAC and MP3 files equally well, and turns out perfect audiobooks every time.
• It adds chapter marks at the track boundaries.
• It’s straightforward.
• It’s free (though donations are requested, and it’s well worth making a small contribution).

There are a few minuses:

• It’s free, so support can be limited.
• You still have to follow my long instructions to get your audiobook tracks imported from CDs in the first place (though you can simplify or omit some of the steps).
• Quirks and UI limitations, due to working as an AppleScript.
• Can’t handle multiple merges of tracks.

This last issue is the one that killed me, while importing the Harry Potter books. The trick is that I wanted to merge all of the disc tracks for a single chapter together, and then merge all of the chapters together to make a single book. But once the chapter tracks were merged, the chapter track would cause the merge of the entire book to fail. It seemed to be an underlying bug in QuickTime, but there was no way around it. Until I found…

The Recommended Solution: Audiobook Builder

I’ve written a complete review of Audiobook Builder, a $10 utility whose sole purpose is to create perfect audiobooks. So again, I’ll keep myself to plusses and minuses. On the plus side:

• Perfect audiobooks, every time.
• It handles the entire process, from importing CDs to adding to iTunes. You can skip all of my silly steps, and work entirely within Audiobook Builder. This is a huge timesaver. Even if you only work at Starbucks, after 3-4 books you’ll have saved enough time to pay for it.
• Handles discs and tracks that are in any format, and adds chapter marks at exactly the places you tell it. Also handles the merge-chapter-tracks-then-book-tracks problem easily.
• It automatically works around a few bugs known to exist in iPod firmware, related to very long tracks like audiobooks.
• My experiences with Splasm Software’s support have been exceptional.

The minuses are very minor:

• The user interface for grouping tracks together prior to the final merge can be confusing initially, and tricky even after you master it. This is only a problem if you’re being anal retentive (like me) about having your chapter marks at actual chapter boundaries in the book.
• There are a few features that I’d like to see added, to make things even easier.

That last “minus” really isn’t fair. Audiobook Builder comes very close to being the ideal tool for making audiobooks, so calling it out for not being perfect is really nitpicking.

Anyway, for more details on these three tools, follow the links. Until I get around to writing an excruciatingly detailed account of how I build my audiobooks, those are my last words on merging audiobook tracks.

Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But if even half of them would be useful, then you’re way, way ahead.

For me, the big winners are 1password, TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro, and Pixelmator. Pixelmator alone costs $10 more than the bundle, and I’d been meaning to buy it for over a month, since this terrific review of Pixelmator appeared in Macworld magazine. So buying the bundle was an easy decision.

Maybe it will be for you as well.

The Amazon Kindle has a bunch of innovative features that are new in an ebook device, the two most important being an always-on wireless connection to the Internet, and the services provided by the (always connected) Amazon Kindle Store. You can learn more about the device’s specific features at the Kindle Store.

There has been a wide range of opinions expressed about the Kindle, from violent dislike to sighs of bliss. Probably the two best, most reasoned opinions come from Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times, who likes the Kindle a lot, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who hopes and believes it will fail. (And here are two more that also bring intelligent perspectives.)

Since I don’t own and haven’t even held a Kindle, I hesitate to express an opinion about it. On the one hand, looking at the features list, the device gets a lot of things right. But having a feature is not the same as doing it well; just look at the iPod vs. its competition. The devil’s in the details, and without using one, I can’t say if the feature list is a bunch of checked off boxes, or capabilities that are a delight to use (these reviews make me think the former). And there are also some small-but-serious omissions; for me the number one issue is no backlight, which means I can’t use it in bed without turning on a reading light, which wakes Rochelle up if she’s sleeping — a big no-no.

So I think it’s too early to tell. I would predict success for it, if it was not so relentlessly unstylish, trapped in a case designed for the 1980s. It’s not that style is the most important thing, but it is important.

In the end, the only reason I’m bothering to post about the Kindle at all is because among its many features, it can play audiobooks from Audible.com. As I wrote above, I have no idea if this feature is well-implemented, and I have a hard time imagining it as a good fit for audiobooks in a car while commuting (the form factor is all wrong). But if you’re the sort of person who “goes both ways” with their books (print and audio), you might find the Kindle very interesting.

Disclosure: If you buy a Kindle through the links above, I’ll get a kickback from Amazon. I’m not particularly recommending you do that, but just so you know.

The thing is, when I downloaded the ~175 meg update, and opened the disk image, there were five updated applications, but none of them were the updated TiVo Transfer. WTF?

Turns out you just need to run the main Toast application, and use the Extras menu to activate TiVo Transfer. The updated application will be written to the same directory as Toast.

Currently there is only one article in the section, Playing BitTorrent Downloads on a TiVo Series 3, reflecting a new trick that I figured out for my TiVo, namely downloading video from the Internet and playing it back, in high-definition (HD). It’s not nearly as easy-to-use as iTunes and an Apple TV, but it does work, and with the much wider variety of video content available on the Internet, something that iTunes can’t handle.

Playing BitTorrent Downloads on a TiVo Series 3

The article covers installing and configuring TiVo Desktop software on your computer, downloading video from the Internet using Miro, converting it to a TiVo-compatible format with VisualHub, and transferring it to your TiVo for playback.

Currently the instructions are Mac-only, but a reasonably savvy person could easily figure out how to use them on a PC, with slightly different software (pointers are given in the article).

Here’s the book’s description (from the iTunes Store):

What would you steal if you couldn’t get caught? It started as the perfect crime. Then it took a turn for the worse. Charlie and Oliver Caruso are brothers who work at Green & Greene, a private bank so exclusive you need two million dollars just to be a client. But when the door of success slams in their faces, they’re faced with an offer they can’t refuse: three million dollars in an abandoned account. No one knows it exists, and even better, it doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s a foolproof crime. More important, for Charlie and Oliver, it’s a way out of debt and the key to a new life. All they have to do is take the money. But when they do, they quickly discover they’ve got a lot more on their hands than the prize. Before they can blink, a friend is dead – and the bank, the Secret Service, and a female private investigator are suddenly closing in. Trapped in a breakneck race to stay alive, Charlie and Oliver are bout to discover a secret that will test their trust and forever change their lives.

Note: I haven’t listened to this, so I have no idea if it’s any good. The reviews on the iTunes Store are mixed. But what the heck, it’s free, right?

I spent a bit of time creating a flyer to advertise them, and packed up a kit with stapler, tape, marker, etc., so that I could put them up in good places. Then I drove 45 minutes to the Computer History Museum, where the festival was taking place.

The second person who saw the flyer said, “OK, I’ll take them.” I hadn’t even posted it yet! After 10 minutes of transferring from my car to his truck, the BeBoxes had a new home, and better prospects for being refurbished and restored to their former, if not glory, at least functionality.

Rochelle hasn’t stopped smiling since I got back with an empty car. And I have to admit, with the CRAP efforts we’ve made in the last two months, it seems like we might recover the use of our third bedroom before the end of the year. That will make us both smile!

“I haven’t seen you in class recently, given up the gym?”

“Yes. Vodka is the new Spinning.”

(Spinning is a form of exercise, usually very high intensity.)