Tag: spoken-word

Subscribing to Audible.com Podcasts in iTunes

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.

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Importing Audiobook CDs into 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Note: These instructions have been superseded by a new version available in the Aldo on Audiobooks section of this site.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.

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