My pal David Barr Kirtley’s story, “Blood of Virgins,” which originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, was just adapted for audio by Escape Pod. You can listen to it here. I haven’t listened to the new recording yet, but I’ve read the story, and I’ve heard Dave read it; it’s good stuff–go check it out.
Someone should really offer to ghostwrite Stephen Colbert’s Alpha Squad 7. I’m just sayin’.
If you fancy yourself an audiobook narrator, then check this out: SFF Audio has issued a challenge to all its readers to create audiobooks of any one of a number of public domain works of SF/F.
Looks like all you win is a free audiobook, but still, looks like a fun contest.
I’m flying down to Brunswick, GA on Friday to hang out with my old college roommate for the weekend. Anyone know of anything in that area that a geek like myself should check out? Brunswick is on the coast, near the Florida border (it’s about an hour away from Jacksonville, which is the airport I’m flying into).
Incidentally, he has the very geek-friendly last name of Swords.
As you all probably recall, last week I was soliciting opinions about Ikea products, in regards to my desire to purchase a wardrobe. Well, a couple days after I asked this question and got all those responses (thanks!), I saw an old ep of Futurama in which the professor orders some kind of supercollider from them, which is delivered by an Ikea robot, which looks like a TV stand. It delivers the supercollider, but on its way out the door, one of its wheels breaks off, and the shelf inside of its cabinet collapses. And when they put the collider together, Bender exclaims “Ah, there. Finished. And with only six missing pieces!” to which Fry replies: “Those Swedes sure know how to put in almost everything you need.”
Hopefully you guys will be right and Futurama will be wrong when it comes to my wardrobes…
[Note: This post was split off from a post about ripping audiobooks.] Another bone I have to pick with Apple is that we still can’t program our iPod’s buttons to do what we want. See, to me, the rewind function of the back/rewind button is almost completely useless. With the way iPods are currently configured, it makes much more sense to rewind an audiobook using the click wheel to rewind, because trying to do so with the back/rewind button inevitably ends up with you skipping to the track previous more often than not, because to rewind you have to hold down the back button. The click wheel method is easy enough, but not ideal. So what I would like to do is reprogram the back/rewind button. Here’s what I’d do:
And while I’m at it, here’s a few other things I’m unhappy about, but don’t necessarily have anything to do with audiobooks:
Does anyone have any experience using Anapod Explorer with their iPod instead of iTunes?
For all you audiobook listeners out there, here’s trick I learned about importing audiobooks into iTunes that you might appreciate:
Okay, so what that will do is rip the CD as one long track (about an hour and 15 minutes long or so), instead of ripping the CD into individual tracks (which for audiobooks is not at all useful). Also, this will make your iPod remember your playback position, so if you stop listening to the audiobook (to, say, listen to music), when you return to your audiobook, it’ll remember where you left off. This way, all you have to remember is which disc you’re on, which shouldn’t be too difficult. Putting the disc number in the album field lets you keep track of which one is which while you’re importing. After you rip all the tracks, you’ll probably have to rename each one with something to identify which audiobook it is (if you have several on your iPod), unless you’re just going to put them all into a separate playlist. In that case, just select all the ripped tracks and open the Get Info box, then enter the title of the audiobook or the author as Artist.
With this system, you’ll still have to switch from track to track every 75 minutes or so, but it’s much better than dealing with 3 minute tracks. I like to keep my iPod on shuffle, so that really messes with audiobook listening if you rip them track by track.
The other option you have is to download a program called Markable; I initally loved this program, but I started to have inexplicable problems with it and gave up in frustration. It handily combines all of your tracks into one big bookmarkable audiobook file (much like an Audible.com file). If the audiobook is really long, you’ll have to split it into a few large tracks (again, like Audible). My trouble with it was that it would remember where I was, but when I pressed play, it would play for about 30 seconds, then skip to the next track, losing my place in the process. This didn’t happen every time, but often enough to be really annoying. So I’ve stopped using it in favor of the method outlined above. Markable’s other problem is that it’s really slow and uses up a lot of processing power, so you probably wouldn’t want to be using your computer while Markable is working.
I was discussing this sort of thing last night at the post-KGB dinner. The fact that I rip audiobooks in this fashion apparently makes me a “power user.” What, regular people don’t like features that make their products better? It shouldn’t take a power user to figure out a method like this; Apple needs to get with the program and make it easier for audiobook listeners to use their iPod for that purpose.
[Update: I recently discovered, that you can create folders in iTunes, and bundle playlists into said folders. So you can create an audiobooks folder, and then create separate playlists for each audiobook, and keep them all within the audiobooks folder. Genius!]
[Note: This post previously included a rant about the annoying quirks of iPod/iTunes, but I’ve split that part into another post.]
I’ve included a link to my topic at the Rumor Mill to the bottom of each post, to serve as a temporary comment area until I can get the regular comments functioning properly again.