Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I’ll fess up now. I like audiobooks. I spend too much time commuting and too little time with the paper books in hand, so I got hooked on audiobooks back in 1998 when I discovered the Rob Ingles version  of Lord of the Rings on Napster. I since found the whole set on ebay, so don’t panic. But in those days, my MP3 player was a Sony Vaio that ran very cool and could be kept in a backpack with the player going. Then I’d get in the car and play the actual CDs. These days, with my iPhone plugged directly into the car, I finally broke down and picked up a $10 copy of Audiobook Builder, and nested The Hobbit through The Return of the King (and the appendix, Annals of the Kings and Rulers) into a single run of 5 segments as a single audiobook.

In practice this changes my original collection of 20ish files per CD times what, 15ish CDs per book into about 5 for the entire set of 4 books. The original rip I had done was in the early, bad days of MP3, 32kbps, 22mhz, blah blah blah, and plainly it sounded like a robot squawking into your ear, but you could tell what it was and after about 2 minutes, you were tuned out of the noise issue. And the files were tiny, which was my intent. So when I did this project, I ripped to Lossless and then had Audiobook Builder downsize to the current audiobook norm format: 64kbps, 22mhz, mono, and the sound is spectacular by comparison. Space savings? Probably negative in total. But the joining of the files was not all I got out of this.

I also did this with the Harry Potter audio collection, although I didn’t merge all the books into a single string of files (Parts 1-15 at 12 hours each?) But what is extremely cool about the newer iPhone/iPod generation plus Audiobook Builder is that you can add the chapter art (found via google) to the chapter headings. It makes it just that much more interesting to listen to and remember, as the art changes with each chapter. I wish Audible had that feature. Heck, I wish Audible books more often had chapter marks that matched the book’s chapters.

I also did something that I’m not sure is smart, but I’m pretty sure it’s not dumb. I re-ripped all those discs as Lossless AAC, so the next time a cooler, better codec comes along, I can just re-encode them from the lossless source (idea originally from pixelknave). Disk space is becoming cheap enough and I can just stash the files on my 2TB ReadyNAS, out of the way of my iTunes library.