What isn’t Apple, audiobooks, or alcohol is probably cats.
Just a quick note to congratulate the winners for this year’s Audie awards, the Grammy Awards of the audiobook world. (Yes, I know there is an actual Grammy for audiobooks, but the Audie is the real award to win.)
The 2012 Audie winners are all available at Audible.com, for your immediate listening pleasure.
I’ve just published a ridiculously long explanation of why the iPod Nano is the best playback device for audiobooks. If you’re interested, here’s the article:
“Which iPod Should I Buy?”:/audiobooks/ipod-recommendations/
I’ve just published in Aldo on Audiobooks a ridiculously long explanation of why the iPod Nano is the best playback device for audiobooks. If you’re interested, here’s the article:
I am frequently asked, “Which audio player should I buy to use with my audiobooks?” At first I would reply with a great deal of information, most of which is completely irrelevant to the question. I’ve come to realize that the answer is quite simple. You only have to make one decision…
I’ve written how Rochelle and I listen to audio books on our iPods. It’s by far the best way we’ve found to fill commute and other dead time, and I frankly barely use my iPod for music; probably 95% of the time, it’s on for audio books. And one character rises above them all: Harry Bosch.
I’ve written how Rochelle and I listen to audio books on our iPods. It’s by far the best way we’ve found to fill commute and other dead time, and I frankly barely use my iPod for music; probably 95% of the time, it’s on for audio books.
The novel that got me well and truly hooked was Lost Light by Michael Connelly. It was one of the highest rated unabridged books on ::audibletl(“000”, “Audible.com”):: in 2004, and Rochelle picked it out on a whim. Mystery genre, highly rated by other listeners, a good narrator on the sample provided. Nothing more complicated than that.
We listened to it on a drive back from LA, and were gripped. When we got home, we dragged our crap into the house, and got immediately into bed with the book playing over the stereo to finish it. It was superb, and remains my favorite audio book.
The best news was that it was the ninth book in an 11-book (and continuing) series about LA homicide detective Harry Bosch. We’ve since acquired all of the other Harry Bosch novels which are available in unabridged format on Audible.com (about half of the total books written)…and all the rest on MP3 CD (I’ll write more about those soon).
Every time I listen to a Harry Bosch novel, especially the ones narrated by Len Cariou, I have Harry Bosch dreams, and can hear the narrator’s voice in my head for weeks. Highly, highly recommended.
Phillip Torrone’s “Audible does Podcasts – the complete guide (and HOW TO)”:http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/06/audible_does_po.html is a nice write-up of a new feature at “Audible.com”:http://www.audible.com/ that supports the automatic download of periodic audible content. Although his article uses the very nice “iPodder”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipodder/ application to demonstrate the features, there’s no reason why you can’t use the built-in podcasting features of iTunes 4.9. Here are instructions and a couple of screenshots.
Phillip Torrone’s Audible does Podcasts – the complete guide (and HOW TO) is a nice write-up of a new feature at Audible.com that supports the automatic download of periodic audible content, such as NPR’s Fresh Air (probably the best talk radio show on today).
Audible.com’s features provide support for receiving paid content using the same process for subscribing to the free podcasts which have recently become very popular. Although his article uses the very nice iPodder application to demonstrate the features, there’s no reason why you can’t use the built-in podcasting features of iTunes 4.9, and skip the extra application.
Here are instructions and a couple of screenshots, which you can splice into Phillip’s article where he’s working with iPodder.
Continue reading “Subscribing to Audible.com Podcasts in iTunes”
Rochelle and I have fallen in love with listening to books on our iPods. We’ve signed up for two books a month through Audible.com, and for me, that pace is actually pretty good. Rochelle goes through them faster, though, and recently started going to the SF Public Library to get more books to listen to. Importing them onto an iPod is not terribly intuitive. This post describes what I think is a fairly optimal process, using only iTunes to do the importing.
Note: These instructions have been superseded by a new version available in the Aldo on Audiobooks section of this site. Please use that version instead of this page.
Rochelle and I have fallen in love with listening to books on our iPods. We’ve signed up for two books a month through Audible.com, and for me, that pace is actually pretty good. But Rochelle has more time to listen while commuting and at work; she blows through our two books a month.
She recently started going to the library to get audio books there, on CD. The San Francisco Public Library has quite a lot of them, and you can reserve them online. The only downside with the CDs is they cannot be played (directly) on an iPod. Enter the second half of Apple’s one-two combination, iTunes, which makes importing CDs relatively easy, and keeping them organized, syncing them with an iPod, and making custom playlists extremely easy.
The only problem is, it’s optimized for music CDs. It’s taken quite a bit of trial and error — mostly error — to come up with a recipe that works well, and produces audiobook files that are reasonable in size and quality, and as easy to use on our iPods as the books from Audible.com. I’m going to save you some time, and share the recipe.