I need some help. W love listening to audio books. Always in the he car, we spend a couple of hours a day in the car so we can get through quite a few books. So far here is how I have done it.
I borrow CDs from the Local library and plaything em directly with the Car CD player. This works well now I have a spot to put the case…we broke a couple of cases and had to replace them before I learnt that lesson. This is so far the most efficient method but it is limited to what the library carries and we will soon run out. I have another library group I can start on but they charge late fees and 7 disc stories can take a while to get through. I pay little to no attention to return dates and just keep them until I am done reading/listening.
The other method I use involves putting them onto my iPhone and playing them through there Bluetooth stereo in the Car. This has a couple of problems 1) stupid iPhone doesn’t always remember where we are up too…especially if I change to another book after the kids get out for MY drive time or if I switch between music and audio books it forgets where we are up to. Not a big deal always but difficult when you don’t realise and have to pull over to find your place while running late for school. Getting them onto the iPhone in the. First place is too time consuming and everytime I sync I loose my playlists. ( another iTunes fault, possible because it is primarily a phone not an iPod?)
Anyone got a simpler solution? Less time consuming one?
Then there is where to get the books from.
Tell me where do you get your audio books from. I want lots. For both the kids and I. They must be downloadable as we have no streaming in the car.
Also does anyone with an iPhone or I device have an app to speed up the play that works well?
Great questions. Unfortunately I don’t have a solution, but I can tell you what I do.
My wife has the iphone. I’ve never succumbed to apple products 
… ha ha, but seriously I tried itunes one time several years ago and hated it. I just wanted to drag and drop when loading and have things in folders - that was all. itunes just seemed a bit intrusive to me. I’ve had a few mp3 players, the best one was a Sony Walkman that could play for about 24 hours between charges - I lost it a year ago when I didn’t grab it out of a rental car I was returning. I now have 2 Sansa Clips 8G (they hold a charge for maybe 10 hours) each with very large microSD. One player malfunctioned and I only use the microSD for listening. When one runs out of juice, I can put on the other. This way I can also have two audio books going if I want to. The player has bookmarking if you go from book to music and back - though I’ve found you have to remember what track you were on. I has a 1.2x feature, but I’m not using it anymore since I use MP3 Speed to speed up the file before I load it on. There’s no pitch perserve on the Clip. My reason for going with the Clip was just price - having two for the same price as one walkman… and at the time I wanted the faster speed option.
I almost always get the audio books from the library and then digitize them for later listening. This adds a step, but it allows me to listen to it fast.
I worry about running out of books. I’m setting up a system for my mother in law, and our recommendation to her is to use audible to get the books and then play everything off of her computer. She has a lot of disposable income and she’d never take that additional step of digitizing books. I should mention that I have three computers at my work desk and one of them I use to load the books… but even if I only had one computer, these days they’re good enough to rip a CD while also doing other things (a few years ago this wasn’t the case).
I just got a Sound-fly mp3 player/transmitter for my wife’s car (the other option was to just get a new stereo put in), but I haven’t set it up yet. I has bookmarking BUT my understanding is that you have to press the bookmark option before turning it off - each and every time! Cheap solutions have their drawbacks I guess.
For going from one book to another, an easy suggestion would be to use two players. This solution could be quite affordable.
For books, audible will have the largest selection, but the cost starts at around $11/book but I’ve heard they have sales where you can buy all you like for $5 (members only) - I’m hoping to take advantage of that with the in-laws membership.
Thanks that does help!
Makes me feel less stupid because I am spending far too much time getting books ready to listen to! lol good to know others are too!
Multiple devises is clearly an strong option. I always have at least 3 I devises with me. iPhone and 2 or 3 iPads. So a book on each is feasible.
Last night I put overdrive on my iPad and downloaded a book from my local library just for me to my iPad. (yes I ran out of room and had to delete a couple of less popular apps…storage is clearly going to be an issue) this will connect through blue tooth to the stereo in the car ( I am pretty sure I havnt done it yet though it should be the same as the iPhone) and won’t interrupt the place we are up to on the phone book or music. If I manage to is carefully I could play music and multiple books. I will need to teach the kids to get them started so we arnt late for school lol the problem with this is that there are only a very small handful of the books I want through my local library. I will run out before the end of this year. I can access one or two more library systems and they might have overdrive links to regional libraries but I can’t remember my pin so I have to go for a drive to link it up. basically I will run out of books too quickly either way. I do like that overdrive app remembers more than one library! Maybe I could BORROW a membership from a relative who lives in Sydney or London even that should give me more choices!
I don’t love iTunes either when it comes to loading books/music and basically any media you didn’t buy from iTunes is a pain to sync. Drop and drag would be so much better. iTunes once you are familiar with it Is a good organising system and it does lots of organising automatically for me. ( like copy it all to an external hard drive so I don’t loose everything in a crash!) but it is FAR from perfect.
Is the time you spend copying discs, and speeding up files worth it? And then is the space worth storing them for the long term? Or do you listen and dump them? I suppose three computers would help there! I have one laptop and two external drives of 1T and 2T. I seem to spend too much time copying and sorting.
I think I might sign up for an audible account at some point when I run out of books. Or maybe a few months before I run out so I can collect some. I do love the selection they have. And in theory I Can download strait to whatever devise I want to listen to it on. no mucking about transferring. It’s the old time verses money debate again isn’t it :wacko:
Off to check out TMTs links now!
Put it this way on the time factor - I easily make up the marginal time I spend loading the discs and hitting rip. I probably could make this even just by digitizing alone because having all the discs in one folder makes the transition from disc to disc seamless when I listen. Imagine having to stop what I’m doing to change out the disc, that could cut some serious production, whereas my ripping is usually done while I’m doing something else. It does take time, but I think it’s worth it. Then if I compress the time down by speeding up the files, that’s not even close. I select a folder, it loads up, I select a destination (usually same title but in a FAST folder), click the stopwatch icon and leave the room to do whatever I’m doing. All this happens mostly while I’m busy with other things. The time consuming part is putting files onto the microSD or the player’s flash memory, but even this is done during my recreation time (and I’m probably listening to another audio book while I do it, ha ha). The average book I listen to is probably about 9 discs. If you figure an hour each the math would look like this:
Player has 1.2x without pitch preserve. I just cut the listening time from 9 hours to 7 hours 30 minutes (9/1.2). There’s no way I spent an hour and a half doing any of the above.
With the new software, I will typically compress to 1.6x (I can go faster, but I guarantee that I can keep up at this speed)
The book now takes 5 hours 38 minutes to listen to.
That additional step just cut my listening time 26% or an additional 2 hours, and I have normal pitch of the reader. It’s certainly worth it for most books (there might be a book where going fast is a disadvantage)
On my computer while working in my home office, I’m usually listening using VLC at 2x which is exactly halving the time, if I need to pause to write something down, I can do it (I can’t always do this while listening and multitasking away from the office - which means I have to try and remember certain details for later recall)
I will normally make sure to take a list of key things from the book and turn them into questions and then input them into Anki (a freeware version of SuperMemo) … this way a lot less is lost to forgetting. This last part may or may not be worth the time - that’s debatable, but I sure remember a whole lot more from the books I read. lol
Most books I keep, but I ripped them at 64bps in the first place which keeps their size fairly low. I have a bit of room on that particular HDD (and my external). Some of these I will never listen to again, and some I will. When I decide I’ll clean up the folder.
Did I mention that I already started a collection of good audio books for PokerCub? lol
Overdrive has been my way to go. And right now we are enjoying the great selection from our library. It doesn’t have all the books I want to read but I have a huge list that I am working through. I love the speed up feature. That is essential for me. I think audible has the same good speed up feature… Or maybe I was just using the overdrive app. I wish I could remember.
What audio library are you using. I still have my library card from when I lived in Australia. But it is a regional library. I wondered if it were linked to the state library. My small town library is linked to 2 state databases in Ohio.
And yes! iTunes is horrendous. I am completely at odds with it. I have tried to transfer audio books onto the iPad from my computer. But despite washing YouTube vides and reading tutorials it is still not working.
Right now I am using Logan city libraries but it doesn’t seem to be linked to anything but itself ( which is about 8 libraries and good sized ones) so it isn’t enough for my appetite. I noticed that the Brisbane city library is linked to many regional libraries which makes figuring out my pin more worth the drive into the city…
I was thinking that a link to a university library would cover much more of what I want to read but I have to pay for that and I am not sure they have much on audio at the moment.
Ok so by speeding up the audio ( which I havnt done yet because it hasn’t been an option in many of the methods I have tried so far) would make the copying worth while. Point taken. :biggrin: I lose some of the time you save because I really can’t multi task much while I am ripping CDs. I can cook dinner and rip though so I guess if I plan it right…I was ripping while watching TV with hubby ( which I find boring but he likes my company :rolleyes: ) but he complained about the noise! >:(
Storage for school items for 3 kids from birth to high school is an enormous amount of digital space. I warned you, :ohmy: I will have no choice but to delete at some point.
I rarely re listen or reread anything. I tend to remember all I found important at the time. I take notes if I find a good idea to try out…more to ensure I try it than remember it. But never rereading means I might miss things that are more relevant to me at a later time in our lives. Or a deeper meaning in some cases. But overall I find rereading quite boring.
I need to start taking notes on books mentioned WITHIN other books but yes this is difficult to do while driving along lol
Thanks for the help!