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Creative Commons Audiobooks
xanderwilson writes "The New York Times (2nd half of the article; free reg. required as always) writes, 'Project Gutenberg is well known for offering free electronic versions of famous public-domain texts. Now Telltale Weekly wants to be its audio-book equivalent.' Of interest to others in the Slashdot community: Ogg Vorbis and MP3 downloads, payment via Bitpass micropayments, and a cheap-now, free later (with a Creative Commons License) business model." (And if you buy the Ogg Vorbis versions, part of the money goes to xiph.org.)
Five years or 100,000 paid downloads whichever comes first... yes I can support that model. Why the heck can't the RIAA or MPAA get with it??? nah, they've got to keep milking the cash cow for as long as they possible can... why else is stuff like Pink Floyd or Led Zepp's back catalogue so expensive still some thirty years after first release???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
What a neat idea, I've been looking for some portable culture for my daily commute
You must not have looked very hard:
cat something.txt | festival --tts | lame - something.mp3
or something like that, I don't remember on top of my head.
I used to do that to get the news in my mp3 player automatically in the morning before hitting the road. Of course, it's not very convincing when it tells you something extremely sad or exciting, but it's understandable.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The idea is to slowly and continually fund, stock, and build a free audio library. Recordings of classic texts, which is the heart of Telltale Weekly, will be offered freely after five years or a given number of sales. When free, these audiobooks can be freely distributed whereever and however, including at Project Gutenberg, if they are interested.
Selling the work cheaply until then pays for current and future bandwidth, hosting, and recording costs--and attracts more talent to the project.
Alex.
Text-to-speech technology is no substitute for an audio book. Audiobooks are read by humans. Humans use slightly different voices for different characters, and infuse their voices with emotion. Some audiobooks are dramatized, with different readers for each character.
Would you take the script of a play or a movie, run it through tts and then say it was even a passable substitute for the original?
Actually you did pay. You paid when you bought your iPod, and you pay when you buy from iTunes. Or rather Apple paid and passed the cost on to you. Now it's not a huge cost, but it's there.
I like Ogg primarily because it's a better format, it compresses a bit better, is much more flexible, and has other usefull features.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Apple already paid it for you -- which means you paid when you bought it. All legal mp3 players have to pay for a license. They just pass it on to you in the price of your player.
How much did it cost me? Let's say I paid $300 for my iPod; how much of that $300 went to the MP3 playback license?
This fails to address iTunes, of course. I didn't pay for that at all, and yet it includes a licensed MP3 encoder. So that doesn't quite add up.
What I'm getting at is this: the fact that Ogg doesn't cost anything to license doesn't matter to the end user. Not at all. So if you want to use Ogg as a selling point, you're going to have to come up with something better than "it's cheap."
I write in my journal
What I don't get is why they didn't choose Ogg Speex, a codec that is similarly Free, but aimed especially at voice recordings.
I know a thing or two about sound. I don't think that equipment is the big barrier - while audiophiles and sound engineers love to spend tens of thousands of dollars, the truth is that if you get a decent mic (about $100) for your PC, that will be plenty for spoken voice. Sure, it may not have perfect frequency reproduction and good noise rejection, but we're not recording a live band - just one person with no stray noise. You should also have a nice quiet room.
Where the cost comes into it is in the editing. Most people probably have acceptable voices - if you just teach yourself to speak at a good rate without stuttering. However, NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, can read a page of text without any errors. Those nice audiobooks that you buy probably had 5 takes for every paragraph. If somebody misreads a sentence they probably just pause and reread it. Then the editor has to listen to the whole thing and splice out the errors. That takes TIME! Plus they probaby do multiple recordings of passages as necessary to get the right dramatic effect.
Then of course somebody has to "proofread" the final work for accuracy.
It is just like filiming movies - a nice digital camera is probably all you need to make a feature film, in theory (that and the sound equipment). However, the reality is that you need to film each scene from 14 angles 24 times and pick the very best clips for the show. That is what makes filming expensive.
I don't think that you'll ever see a completely free Gutenberg-like project for audiobooks - at least not until voice synthesizers sound just like people. Gutenberg works because of OCR and the ease of distributed proofreading.
Maybe the first step would be a distributed editing approach for audiobooks. If you could get somebody to do the initial reading, the editing could potentially be distributed. Granted, forget a simple web-browser interface - we'll need client-server at the least (potentially a Java applet might work), and lots of bandwidth. Still something worth thinking about though...
Ah, somebody understands....
Still something worth thinking about though...
At some point later this year I'd like to start a steering/planning discussion (forum or list, likely) about the direction Telltale will take to become more community-led. I'm fairly certain that by the end of the year, this project will be limited by what I'm doing with it, rather than encouraged by my work. If this is something that interests you, I hope you'll send me a note or join the newsletter.
Alex.
Its also due to the fact that its been filtered by the years.
:-)
When folks talk about how great anything was X years ago, they conviently forget about all the shit that didn't make it. Its like houses, a good friend of mine always claims they don't make them like they use to and point of the great old houses available today -- duh...the bad shit fell down, burned down or was torn down.
If you listen to any popular oldies station, they recycle the same play list over and over and over. Out of 1982, I can count maybe 3 or 4 great songs. The rest were average. Out of 1967, I can do the same. Out of 2004 -- I actually feel like there is far more diversity to choose from, but honestly, there is probably just as few GREAT songs on the radio.
So, a band's music survives 30 years...thats almost like claiming that copyright works perfectly. In the beginning they make crap and survive like anyone else. As they progress, the field weeds out. Its only in their old age when their output is nothing and bandmembers had dies off that this stuff gets any recognition.
Personally, I think copyright should be limited to a smaller time frame than is currently given, but how much smaller? Few can agree on that part
Again, its only '99.9999%' better because the law of averages over the years...
Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
What I found interesting is this type of advertising is far from new. I found some old radio programs. The Fibber McGee and Molly episodes were a real eye opener. The show did not break for a word from the sponsor. The pitch man added the product endorsement as part of the show. It seemed to fit just like the Monty Python SPAM SPAM SPAM episode that is so famous except the old radio show was promoting a floor wax. Killing the promotion would leave out an entertaining part of the show. Other than the industry hang-up with DRM and the "perfect copy", the advertising with product placement has come full circle back to the 1940's.
Too bad I have to go to the '40's and '50's to get DRM free MP3's of good radio shows. Most everything newer is locked up in vaults and copyright never to be heard again. I would like to collect the Radio Mystery series from the '70's, but CBS refuses to release it.
The truth shall set you free!