Aldoblog

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, slowing down the playback can help to hear nuances of pronunciation and emphasis.

But the options provided by the iPod is not that great, just “Slower”, “Normal”, and “Faster”. Not a lot of control, and the speed change isn’t huge, in either direction. (And I find that it adds a nearly imperceptible but irritating clipping to speech). If you want to make an even bigger speed change, you need to turn to third-party tools that can process the tracks, and then sync the processed versions to your iPod or iPhone.

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 — mistakes that audiobook publishers make. I always recommend that you listen to the audio sample provided at Audible.com or the iTunes Store before making a purchase; audiobooks can be expensive, and mistakes add up to real money fast.

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 your own computers. For normal people, it’s a look at how much effort it still is to create audiobooks that behave as you’d expect and desire in iTunes and on an iPod.

The Motivation

But before seeing the tedious steps, here’s the why of it. Audiobooks processed as I do below are easier to organize and navigate, and they behave the way I want them to, instead of behaving as individual tracks.

The New York Times has an article about the Alesis TapeLink, which is a tape deck you can attach to your computer via USB, and use to convert analog cassette tapes to a digital format you can use with iTunes, or any other media player. I haven’t tried it, and at $299 list price, I’m not likely to, but if you have a large investment in audiobooks on cassette tapes, it might be a worthwhile investment for getting those books into a format that will last beyond the lifetime of the cassette medium.

If you are looking to stay “on top” of all the latest audiobook releases, there are a variety of sources. Most of the different audiobook publishing houses and audiobook stores have email newsletters, or even paper catalogs they will send you in the mail. I’ve signed up for a lot of these, and find them useful.

But the best source for audiobook releases news I’ve found are the RSS feeds offered by Audible.com. They have feeds for the latest releases, but they also have feeds for best sellers from various lists (NYTimes, etc.), best sellers in various categories, and feeds for specially priced titles, including free content. Audible’s feeds used to be awful, abbreviated entries that were almost useless. But at some point they got a whole lot better, and now tell you the book title, author, and give the full description for the book. They even link to an audio sample of the book, for you to listen to before you buy. Since Audible has the largest catalog of audiobooks, this is about as comprehensive a source as you can find.

Unfortunately, while I would like to link directly to Audible’s feeds page, their horrible web site makes it impossible to directly link to some pages, including that one. So I can only describe how to navigate there yourself.

1. Start at the Audible.com home page.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
3. Click the “RSS” link, which looks like this:

Find a feed that appeals to you, and subscribe to it in your usual newsreader, e.g., Google Reader, NewsGator’s excellent readers, etc. (If you don’t know what a newsreader or RSS feed is, this What is RSS? article is a pretty good introduction.)

A couple of weeks ago, OverDrive, a technology vendor that provides many libraries with the software behind their download-to-loan content, released a new version of the OverDrive Media Console that is now Mac-compatible and iPod-friendly. It accomplishes this by providing loanable downloads in MP3 format, instead of a DRM-wrapped WMA (Windows Media) format.

It’s not clear to me how OverDrive protects the downloaded content, enforces lending period constraints, or otherwise restricts the use of audiobooks downloaded using their system. Some of the instructions and FAQs make it sound a little cumbersome, and generally content producers (the audiobook publishers) require pretty strong restrictions. So I’m a little hesitant to install the new software on my computer (I really need to get a test system…), fearing some hidden DRM kernel extension, or other invasive software.

It’s also not clear to me how much content is available to the new Media Console, at least in the MP3 format supported for Mac users. The older WMA format is much more broadly enabled, as it includes DRM restrictions that publishers are comfortable with. But you can search OverDrive’s national directory of libraries and see if content is available from a library or other source near you.

If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you. Otherwise, I’ll try to give it a whirl in the new year, and post an updated then.

I’ve had 3-4 anti-McCain blog posts in draft status for weeks now, and have wanted to pull the trigger and publish them, sometimes coming within a button press of doing so. But I kept hesitating, and finally tonight decided to dump them, including those already published.

Partly because it’s too late, I doubt there are many true undecideds on the Internet, and none of them visiting here. But mostly because it’s just not Senator Obama’s message. While the other side can only speak terrible untruths, the Obama campaign has been about change, progress, and hope. It’s a message that is deeply patriotic, and for me personally, deeply moving. Getting off that train to take shots at the other guys is just about being sad. Barack is more positive, and that’s where I want to be.

The number one question I receive from visitors to Aldo on Audiobooks is How do I get my audiobooks to show up in the Audiobooks section of iTunes and my iPod/iPhone? With the release of iTunes 8, I can replace hundreds of (a thousand?) words with a single screen shot:

Well, maybe a few words are still in order. Here’s the new process, which will work every time:

1. Import your audiobook using your favorite process, in your favorite audio format. (I’ve written detailed instructions for both standard Audio CD audiobooks and for MP3 CD audiobooks.)
2. Select the imported track(s) in iTunes, and choose File > Get Info, and then click on the Options tab, to get to the Track Info Options panel.
3. From the Media Kind pop-up menu, choose “Audiobook”.
4. Check the Remember playback position and Skip when shuffling options.
5. Click the OK button.

From now on, iTunes, iPods, and iPhones will all treat the track(s) as full audiobooks, including remembering playback position automatically (saving your “bookmark”), skipping the track when you’re playing a random shuffle of music, and allowing you to speed up or slow down playback with the Settings > Audiobooks speed options on your iPod or iPhone.

Note: When you make the above changes, the audiobook track(s) will be moved from the Music source list to the Audiobooks source list. If you haven’t enabled the Audiobooks list, it will seem as though your tracks have disappeared. See Optimal iTunes Import Settings for Audiobooks for more details of enabling the Audiobooks source list.

If you’re interested in more of the details of what’s new in iTunes 8, I suggest iLounge’s Instant Expert: Secrets & Features of iTunes 8 as the best and most detailed guide I’ve seen.

I was getting lunch at Rosamunde Sausage Grill on Tuesday, when CBS reporter Mike Sugarman was talking to people about a PETA-backed group’s proposal to ban hot dogs from school cafeterias.

My reaction takes about a second in the two and a half minute segment, but it is me on TV, so I gotta point to it (hi Mom):

CBS5 San Francisco: Group Looks to Ban Hot Dogs in California Schools

My longer, more thoughtful reaction would be that getting quality food into school cafeterias is a hard problem, because there’s a lot of political issues in play, including funding, contracts, and so on. But the discussion is not helped by the radical vegetarian group PETA, who is hiding behind the scary “cancer” word, and a scientific study they helped sponsor but which does not reveal their affiliation.

I think lunch today will be a nice chili dog at Rosamunde!

I upgraded my original iPhone to the 2.0 firmware release on Thursday night (before all the activation problems started), and have been using it for a couple days now. As others have written at length elsewhere, the 2.0 software release has a ton of improvements. While those are nice, I barely notice them. The real breakthrough (for me) is in the App Store, and having third-party applications on my phone.

Although individual applications are mostly $10 or less, buying a bunch of them adds up. Since everything is so new, there’s not a lot of reviews, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on some of the applications I like.