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Telltale Weekly Audiobooks Now Offered as AAC

Posted by Hemos on from the for-the-purist-in-you dept.

Alex writes "My audiobook project Telltale Weekly now offers DRM-free AAC downloads of its entire catalog of audiobooks in addition to already-supported Ogg Vorbis and MP3. Probably one of the most-requested features since we started. We also released our first booklength work last month, meaning that an unabridged reading of War of the Worlds will be free online in 5 years or sooner."

17 comments

  1. Re:5 years seems like a long time.. by Joe+Tennies · · Score: 5, Informative

    You need to look at his site and see his business model. It's currently released and costs $8 (at least for th Ogg Vorbis version).

    After a couple years, he will release it to the public domain (or some other free license).

  2. Serious question by martinX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do you know why people were requesting AAC in particular? It's not like iTunes and iPods can't play MP3s. Seems like an odd request. That is all.

    --
    When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
    1. Re:Serious question by Kulic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I would assume people want to use AAC instead of MP3 because you get higher quality sound out for the same bitrate.

      Personally I think it's all very subjective and heavily dependent on where and how you're listening to stuff, but people like what they like.

    2. Re:Serious question by xanderwilson · · Score: 1

      AFAIK that's the whole of it.

    3. Re:Serious question by geoffspear · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The sound quality difference may be important to audiophiles who are listening to music, but I can't really see any reason why anyone would care when it comes to audio books.

      --
      Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
    4. Re:Serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what I thought. i wouldn't have gone to the effort for the saving in file size for spoken word files, but more power to him. Perhaps when Apple makes a videoPod, we can download a file of someone actually reading the book :-)

    5. Re:Serious question by System.out.println() · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If I had to guess, they probably wanted AAC's bookmarking ability.

      --
      I've got more mod points and GMail invi
    6. Re:Serious question by colanut · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Good quality at a lower bit rate. As a result, more content fits in the same space.

      But the quality is subjective. 96k MP3 sound fine on my little player while walking and biking. I can fit more in the small usb key than if they were 128s or 160s. If the new format had the same quality at an even smaller bit rate, even better.

  3. Resume Play from Last Location by nuxx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do these audiobooks have the same 'feature' as iTunes / Audible.com audio books, whereas if you stop playing them and go to listen to something else, they start up where you left off?

    If so, can I ask how you make files do that? I'd love to set a number of DJ mixes / live sets to do this, but I haven't had much luck in figuring out how.

    Thanks!

    1. Re:Resume Play from Last Location by BensonLeung · · Score: 5, Informative

      if those files are AAC files, I believe that all you need to do to change it over to the book behavior is rename the file to the extension .m4b and reimport it into iTunes. That is the iTunes Music Store audiobook format, and it treats it as such based on the file extension. There may be something along those lines for mp3s as well...

    2. Re:Resume Play from Last Location by nuxx · · Score: 1

      I'll give this a try once I'm back home at my Mac... Going MP3 -> AAC is trivial, so hopefully this is all there is to it.

    3. Re:Resume Play from Last Location by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      see more info/discussion at macosxhints.com

  4. cant you read books on your ipod ? by johnjones · · Score: 1

    I would like to read books on my ipod screen I know that news readers but where are the poem and so on

    www.

    where going to do this

    regards

    John Jones

  5. I'm illiterate, you insensitive clod! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this product should sell well with those of us who went to public school, never learned how to read, but still managed to get high-paying jobs (read: drug dealer) so we can afford iPods.

    Seriously though, it's great for the yuppie on the go who wants to read but has no time for it.