Audible, iPod and bookmarkable Audio books

Hubs · #1 11-27-2005, 06:59 AM

Friend of mine belongs to Audible this is a service that lets you download audio books . Probably the largest most popular its downside is it is hooked up with Apple it formats in apples restrictive format limiting it to be played on only certain manufacturers mp3 players. The good thing about their encoding is it lets you bookmark where you left off in the book. So it is easy to find where you left off listening to a chapter.
Does anyone know of a way to copy audio books that will split the tracks. with information like a id3 tag or something.
I was thinking of checking out a couple of audio books from my local library just to see if I would enjoy listening to audio books. Are these books recorded in mp3 files or a wav file ? If you wanted to save to a computer would you store them in one big mp3 file and what would be a good compression for audio books 64 kbs ?

#2 11-29-2005, 12:32 AM

There is no way to to record such files with ID3 tags.

DRM protected files are hard to convert. You may try to strip DRM protection first, but some DRM removal tools remove ID3 tags as well.

#3 11-29-2005, 01:33 AM

By the way, you can get iPod player just for joining Audible. See "Special offers and coupons from Audible" here.

Hubs · #4 12-05-2005, 02:46 PM

Thanks for the link to audible.
Looks like if I use a program called MarkAble along with Itunes. I can join and convert the cda files from the audio book cd. Then MarkAble joins all files and converts to one or two large mp3 files. It does not make them bookmarkable with a non ipod mp3 player, but it so far is the best solutiion I have come up with for non Ipod supported mp3 players.

#5 12-07-2005, 01:19 AM

Hubs, Can you please clear up why should I use MarkAble? Why can't I just use a free CD Ripper software (like Exact Audio Copy or CDex) instead?

When choosing a bitrate for your audiobook you should take into account whether it has musical illustration or not. Also bitrate choice depends on a format you use. Low bitrate OGG and WMA sound much better than MP3 of the same bitrate. OGG

I've just opened a free audiobook from AudioBookForFree.Com. It is a 22kHz Mono 24kbps audiobook. That's way enough for me.
Although a friend of mine prefers to encode AudioBooks' CDs to 128kbps 44khz Stereo MP3.
If your iPod supports OGG format, I suggest you to use it for your audioboooks instead of MP3. However I see no reason to convert mp3 files to ogg

.

Also I prefer to have small files 'coz it's much easier to navigate.

Hubs · #6 12-14-2005, 08:51 AM

MarkAble is better in my opinion because it has a audiowizard option. You can put in multiple cd disks from a audio book and then joins all files without the 2 second gaps between files. This makes it one fluid and continous seemless file. If you use it with a Ipod mp3 player it is still bookmarkable. It also of course has a manual mode where you can join any # of tracks together and still eliminates the silent gaps between mp3 files.

Not 100 % sure because have not used Audacity but I believe with Audacity you have to manually remove the silent gaps between mp3 files to make the book seemless. and no bookmarking or skip when in shuffle mode on Ipod . If you have a book file using audacity and are in shuffle mode on a ipod mp3 player with songs the audio book can come up while listening to music. That certainly would be annoying.

Admin · #7 04-02-2006, 10:37 PM

Replay A/V and Replay Radio can create m4b bookmarkable files for your iPod while recording media streams.

#8 07-21-2006, 11:10 AM

Replay Converter is an easy-to-use file conversion program can take audio and video files in all the popular formats and make them iPod-ready as: iPod Audiobook (M4B, AAC), iPod MPEG-4 Video, AAC, MP3.