I've listened to audio books daily for the past five years. At night I drift off to sleep with an ear bud in and my iPod shut-off timer set for thirty minutes; a really good book, and I will reset the timer - more than once. All this listening requires a big supply of audio books.
Averaging thirty dollars a time this could be expensive but thankfully the local library has a large and ever burgeoning stock of books on CD. Ripping the discs is a bit time consuming but a little effort and some file manipulation provides a digital copy to keep.
Another free source is YouTube where rascals upload entire audio books and bask in a remunerative hit count until the Google Police pull their plug. Long in-print books slip through the holes in the net but recent publications don't stay online long. If you want to 'harvest' an audio file best conduct regular YouTube searches! I keep the Amazon books page open too for inspiration and to read reviews. Armed with a few bits of free software, a copy can be collected, trimmed into shape and on your iPod in under an hour.
Freemake Video Converter downloads the YouTube video, extracts only the audio element and saves it to your hard drive in any format you want; mp3 is for iPods.
Next, Audacity is a free audio editing suite with which you can split a fifteen hour file into bite-sized tracks.
With Mp3 Tag Editor you can apply titles, dates, authors, narrators and artwork.
Install a free audio book app to your iPod/iPhone and sync the audio files to your device.
With time and a little tenacity, your favourite book won't ever be due back at the library nor disappear from YouTube.
5 comments:
What do you use to rip the CDs??? This is all very interesting. How do you search YouTube for books??? Do you search for a specific title or can you search for all of Dicken's books and rip just one???
Windows Media Player will rip CDs if you acquire books on disc.
Search YouTube for any book title followed by the word 'audiobook'. I no longer use Freemake Video Converter to download files from YouTube; AVC Free is a better piece of software nowadays. Copy the YouTube URL from the address bar into AVC to download and convert to mp3.
Thank you ever so much. This is very helpful advice. Last night I found out about Overdrive.com which is another way to get audiobooks and ebooks using libraries across the world. I need to spend more time to figure it out.Not sure if my local library card works in other US public libraries.It appears you can check out a book from any library. I must see if it really works.
I also want to tell you you are a gifted writer. Over the past six or so years I read your postings and they are par excellence.
Thank you kindly Buck! Nice to know someone is reading.
Overdrive is also available here in Canada. A great free service and it entirely avoids the need to convert any files.
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