I have toyed with the idea of getting some audio books. Instead of buying them in the store, of course, I thought I would just download them.
I am still suffering from sticker shock.
I know that a fair amount of effort needs to be put into producing a quality audio experience, but I find the $25 average price a little high for me. I think part of it might be my old-fashioned "I want to hold the book in my hands" attitude, but a lot of us still feel this way.
Looking for free audio books, I found the website librivox.org, which connects you to the more than 1,500 free public domain selections available through archive.org and presents them in a nice, easily searchable interface. The problem now is I'm almost overwhelmed, not knowing which titles to pick. Adding to the problem is may knowledge that not all of them have the better production values of the more modern (but expensive) audio books.
My next step took me to the podcast, which we have talked about before in this column. Many of these podcasts have really matured and have excellent production quality. The one I found to keep myself occupied on my next trip is Leo Laporte's This Week in
Tech, or simply TWIT for short.
info and entertainment
The current episode (updated weekly) is 75 minutes long - enough to help ease the pain of a shorter trip and also a great way for me to keep up on what's happening out there in the ever-changing field of technology. I found another podcast about video games, and now my trip will be filled with some great information and entertainment.
I found that downloading and finding the podcasts was extremely easy with Apple's iTunes software, but I still needed to get the actual podcast into my car. There are a few choices, so you'll need to pick the one that suits you best. The great thing about iTunes is that it integrates with the iPod so well. The bad thing about iTunes is that it doesn't always like to play well with other devices.
If your car stereo has an audio input jack on it, hooking up your iPod (or other MP3 player) may be the best solution. Simply download the podcast or audio book onto your portable music player and go from there. If there is no external audio input, you could consider getting an FM transmitter. This device connects to your music player and transmits the audio from the player to an unused FM radio frequency. You then simply tune your car radio to this frequency and listen to the podcast or audio book.
In my case, the CD player in my car is capable of playing back MP3 CDs. Creating one of these with music is pretty easy. Simply drag the MP3 music files from your computer onto the icon representing the CD you wish to make. My podcasts in iTunes, however, involved a little bit more work.
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I found that if I right-clicked on the podcast in iTunes and selected the option "Convert selection to MP3" it made an MP3 version that now showed up in my regular musical library. I could then drag the selection from the library onto the CD.
Even a regular CD (which traditionally holds a maximum of 74 minutes of audio) can store as much as 12 hours of audio in MP3 format. Since CDs cost less than $1 apiece, this makes for a great storage value.
No matter how you are able to hear it, your next road trip might just be a lot more interesting.
Syd Bolton is president of Brant Freenet (www.bfree.on.ca) and curator of the Personal Computer Museum (www. pcmuseum.ca). You can reach him via e-mail at sbolton@bfree.on.ca or by regular mail care of The Expositor, 53 Dalhousie St., N3T 5S8.
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