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Free Audio Content for Long Drives?
goatbar asks: "We are going to be driving across the country at the end of the week to a new job and wondered if there are good sources for free books/stories on tape that we could put on our iPod to make the long hours of freeway driving go much faster. What are your favorite stories for the road and where are good places to pickup content? Old radio shows, mysteries, etc are all good!"
When you get tired of plugging Google stories each day, how about you get around to making sure the story is actually live before you link it on the main page? That way I don't get to see the "Nothing for you to see here. Move along" shit like I've been getting the last five minutes when this hit the main page.
C:\>
if you could find some way of sending frequency modulated radio signals from some central location to a reciever in your motor-car, that might be a solution...
My favorite "story" radio show is This American Life. You can download the shows from Audible for a fee, or, if you're using Linux, you could use something like VSound to get them for free.
Anyone who's heard at least one episode knows the best answer:
This American Life
There are episodes available on iTunes (too expensive though), and free real episodes on their site which could be converted. Listen to some of their best, it is the greatest thing there is for long drives
... as you drive through rural America. Nothing like "You're going to HELL if you don't turn to JEE-ZUZ!" blasting over the entire AM dial.
Project Gutenberg has a bunch of old books in audio formats.
http://www.theafternow.com/listen.php
/. filter won't let me post 5 minutes of text from the first episode. It's available at the bottom of the link above.
Lame
This guy freeforms this multi-season story arc'ing post-apocalyptic cyberpunk fantasy using old style radio-drama techniques. Totally absorbing.
SKC is The Fucking Man
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
I generally look for any kind of talk radio that I can find. Instead of doing music or what have you on a CD or mp3 player, I look for talk radio, and try to learn stuff.
Can't stand the sports talk, but every once in a while, you'll stumble upon a real gem, listening to talk radio in places you've never been to before.
One time, I was driving through the appalations and found a radio equivalent of tech TV. It was fun!
Besides, music puts me to sleep.
Luke
----
Tired of answering tons of basic computer questions for friends and family? Send them to ChristianNerds.com instead!
There's lots of stuff out there. I remember downloading 45 minute radio stories from the 30's and 40's as 10-15MB files in mp3 format @ a bitrate between 20-56 or so.
moox. for a new generation.
uh... congrats on making yourself look like an idiot.
http://podiobooks.com/ -- several audio books
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 -- Audio books including Sherlock Holmes
http://escapepod.info/ -- Sci-Fi
While not free, Cracker Barrel restaurants allow you to buy a book on tape and return it at any location for the purchase price - $4 per week you have the tape.
And there are Cracker Barrel's at about every exit ramp (well, not really, but it seems like it sometimes)
Supplies!
congrats newbie. i see the asterisk by your name. do you actually pay for this crap? what a fucking moron you are in that case.
Or roll your own from a Project Gutenberg (or any other) text file. If you have a Mac, there are various text to speech programs available--for example, books2burn is designed for this.
So long as you don't mind listening to one of the funky Apple system voices for hours on end...!
This year's Technical Audiobooks: Where are the good ones? and Sources of Intelligent Audio for Commute? both had a lot of good suggestions.
Podcasts are good, but (mostly) non-fiction & current. Audible or iTunes or other sources for downloading audio work well, as do ripping CDs to your player.
Check your library. Most will have audio books on CD that you could easily space shift to use in your iPod for a week or two while it was checked out to you.
Borrow Books on CD from your local library. At the end of the journey mail them back to a friend for return to the lender. Nothing passes the time better on a long drive than a really trashy novel on CD.
I always thought that the idea of listening to the audio from DVDs (well, back in the day, I imagined it as from VHS's, but it works the same way) would be nice way of travelling.
On a trip to school, a several years ago, I caught a television broadcast signal on my radio (like, they were transmitting the tv sounds onto the radio), and they were playing the sounds to Casper -- that one with the fat ghost and the smelly ghost and stuff.
Anyway, since I'd already seen the movie, I knew enough to be able to understand what was going on, while still watching the road.
I work on other stuff while "watching" movies at home anyway, and since I don't look at the screen too much when I do that anyway, it's about the same.
Luke
----
Tired of answering tons of basic computer questions for friends and family? Send them to ChristianNerds.com instead!
Podcasts are the way to go.
You can find any type of show you want, they're generally free too. Just find a couple that sound interesting to you!
Comedy College download a few, use vsound, - laugh your butt off all the way there!
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
You could always go to the local library, get a few books on audio CD, convert them to MP3/AAC and load them up on the old pod... with the intention to delete them after listening of course.
One word - google podcast and you'll have plenty to choose from. Here in Denmark the national radio recently started podcasting a selection of their shows - allthough it's mostly their own talk shows since they haven't yet got a plan for redistributing 3rd party IP content. Anyway - look up podcasting and I'm sure you'll find something for the drive... :)
And $10/audio book is dirt cheap compared to what you will find anywhere else. My wife just got the new Harry Potter at the store (JK Rowling is not on Audible) and paid about $50.
Hope my rambling helps!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
You could get Streamtuner and hit record on a bunch of spoken word audio streams so they get recorded via Streamripper into mp3 streams, and take those with you. There's a whole lot of different spoken word stuff that streamtuner shows up, ready for the ripping.
I think you've gotta pay for a good version of those tools if you're running windows though, but who cares about windows anyway.
Actually, I'm a fan of listening to lugradio on my drive to work. If not that I usually just randomly switch through the Podcast Directory.
A couple more to wet your tongue would be to dig through archive and legal torrents.
Alternatively, I know you said you wish to save a bit of dough by doing it the freebie way, but I've gotta tell you Sirius is one hell of an offering.
binaries.sounds.radio.oldtimei o.oldtime
binaries.sound.rad
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Satellite radio. You can find a station you like, and listen to it wherever. I like XM for its comedy stations and it also plays some pretty decent music.
Kyle
Seriously, which country? It isn't mentioned in the topic.
Yup. I suggested them in one of the threads.
Futuretech is another good one which I didn't mention.
These projects are mine:
Spoken Alexandria (free, unabridged recordings in AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 formats; sharing encouraged with Creative Commons Licenses)
Telltale Weekly (cheap, unabridged recordings in AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 formats; after five years they released free at Spoken Alexandria)
Enjoy or ignore.
Alex.
I can't believe someone hasn't mentioned Coast to Coast with Art Belle and George Nori.
If you are driving late at night, or heck snag the previous shows off his web site and burn them to disk, this show will knock your socks off.
Coast to Coast for the uninitiated covers everything from ghosts, fringe science, space travel, aliens, and conspiracies. I swear it's perfect to listen to while coding, drinking with buddies, or long drives.
Now excuse me while I hunker back into my Faraday's cage, and don my tin foil hat!
I fell in love with satellite radio. I'm on the Sirius side of things, but I'm pretty sure that XM is just as good. Nice variety of music, news, talk.
Having just completed a cross-country dash I can recommend the ones I found:
http://www.scottsigler.net/earthcore/ This one is really good, it's the best of the podcasts I currently listen to. Warning: As of this writing he still hasn't released all the chapters (which is pissing me off Scott, get on with it already!) but what is there will take you a day to listen to and well worth the download.
http://www.pinkgeekaudio.net/weblog3/Sherlock Holmes pod casts. While the production quality is not as high as Earth Core, this one is still a good one. Very enjoyable if you are a fan of Holmes.
http://escape.extraneous.org/ I think someone has already mention this one but just in case, here it is. Grab all of these. Some of them are outstanding while others are just interesting. None of them, however, are bad.
Those are the ones that got me from TN to CA. Hope they help you too.
=C=
If you wanted me to agree with you, you shouldn't have given me Mod points.
http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/
They have some low quality downloads for free, otherwise you can get high quality ones for pretty cheap.
I got their dvd of audiobooks, what a deal 500 audio books for only $120. Thats $0.24 per audio book. I listen to them on my way to and back from work everyday. Great stuff!
For $120USD you can buy 7 DVD of audio books.
On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd put most of them at about 6. 1 being monotone and 10 being with backing music, sound effects and great dialog.
The speaker isn't amazing but he is reasonable. Most of the books are in the public domain but some of them aren't. There is a lot of clasics and instead of buying the DVDs you can download them.
I think I figured it would take over 1 year listening none stop to hear them all.
http://www.dvdaudiobooks.com/screen_main.asp
The Internet Archive: Open Source Audio has a lot of free audio with staff picks, popularity stats, etc.
The Internet Audio Archive has lectures as well as music.
(best taken in small doses)
I'm intentionally not putting this link in the proper format to protect the site from mindless click-through hounds. If you want to hear a bunch of good and original stories that might be true but probably aren't, check the archives here;
thepeanutgallery.info
They have a RSS feed for podcast clients, and if you are really good writer yourself...drop them a line. They may actually let you join them. Best to have a story first.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/
Is available in realaudio format via "listen again" links, and transcoding it to something that'll play in the car isn't hard.
(google for "mplayer mp3 realaudio" if you're stuck).
The Jean Shepherd Archive has hundreds of hours of unrestricted downloadable audio collected by fans over the years:
http://shep-archives.com/
Some other sources of unrestricted material:
Transom public radio workshop/showcase:
http://www.transom.org/
Archive.org has some good audio.
http://www.archive.org/
Benjamin Walker's site:
http://toeradio.org/
Cook'd and Bomb'd - Chris Morris site. Hunt around for mirrors that have archived radio programs. (The Blue Jam series is my personal favorite.)
http://chilled.cream.org/
If you don't mind downloading material that's not supposed to be available for download (most easily done using mplayer, I find), then there are plenty of radio offerings. I'm a public radio junkie, and usually stock up on a few dozen shows before taking a long trip. Among my favorites:
Joe Frank. The greatest radio artist in the history of, well, radio artistry. (Subscription costs $10/mo, but is well worth it.)
http://joefrank.com/
This American Life. (free)
http://thislife.org/
Fresh Air. (free, but a pain in the ass to navigate)
http://freshair.npr.org/
Most local libraries (at least here in CT) have a small selection of audio books on CD. I have recently "discovered" audio books myself and they have completely replaced radio and music during drive time. Borrowing them from the library and ripping them to my iPod work really well. The interesting thing is that I am listening to things that I would not consider sitting down to read, and really enjoying them.
... use 64kbit MP3 encoding, that is plently of fidelity for the narration of a book and you can fit twice as much audio as normal. Second, rip the CDs in order and build a play list of all the tracks for just that book, again watching the play order. (Don't forget to turn off song shuffling before playing the book ;-)
A few hints
BTW, in case there are any iTunes developers listening, there are a couple of things that would make iTunes and the iPod much better for audio books. First is a per playlist setting that lets me ALWAYS disable shuffling when that playlist is played. Second is the ability to set a 'bookmark' in the iPod so that I can return to the same spot in the playlist at some future time. Lastly would be a per track or per playlist setting that would keep the tracks from being included when 'all' songs on the iPod are played. These features would make it much easier to go between music and audio books.
Getting back to obtaining audio books from libraries, I am not sure about the legalities of ripping them to an iPod. Seems like fair use, 'cuz that is simply the format I want to play it in, and I am not selling, giving, distributing or anything else. But, that is really a question only a lawyer can answer.
The name says it all, .
http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/
Download Robert Jordan, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Self help books, or parts of the Bible for free.
The catch, 8Kb/s quality. You pay for better quality, compare this to maybe a phone call, but compared to some of those Library used books on tape...
You can also buy full DVDs, or loaded harddrive MP3 players.
-=Down Syndrome in Maine
I expect that one of his local library systems has downloadable audio books. Many local library systems get money from their respective states, and so have to allow any resident of the state to apply for a card. Usually in person, though.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
If you are somewhere near the greater Seattle Area, the King County Library System just started offering free audiobooks online. I think they have about 800 titles, and are pretty good quality, albeit only offered in .WMA
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
Some movies really need the visual aspects to work well, but like you say, if you've seen it once, the audio can really be enough of a cue.
;)
The only movie I actually transferred to audio cassette to listen to in the car so far is "Carlito's Way," which works really well, in my opinion. The Godfather would probably be a good choice. The Monty Python soundtracks-to-movies are also great
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks alt.binaries.sounds.audiobooks alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.audiobooks alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.spoken-word alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.books I've got about 200 CDRs filled with audiobooks. 700MB usualy turns out to be 30-40 hours of runtime (depends on encoding.) I'd estimate 6,000 hours. Over 300 titles.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks alt.binaries.sounds.audiobooks alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.audiobooks alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.spoken-word alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.books
I've got about 200 CDRs filled with audiobooks.
700MB usualy turns out to be 30-40 hours of runtime (depends on encoding.)
I'd estimate 6,000 hours. Over 300 titles.
PS: How do I make sure the selection of Plain old Text STICKS and dosen't keep going back to HTML Formatted?
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
http://www.radiolovers.com/ has free shows as well, such as Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, mysteries, dramas, comedy, etc.
For $7.50/month, RUSC lets you browse many, many series and listen or download as you like. He doesn't post whole collections and he throttles back the downloads, but there's so much to check out it doesn't matter. And if you want a whole series, head on over to Bobby's.
And remember -- the Shadow knows!
Could not find the link on BBC (I know it's there somewhere), but found this on CBC web site. Pretty sure it's the radio show but do double check. http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/04-05/may07.html #1
Look at Cracker Barrel. They have a cool deal on audio books. You buy the audio cd at one CB and return it to any other CB for a full refund minus $3 or something like that per week (rental). I thought it was a cool deal and they have cracker barrels on every major highway.
Gujju
More current:
Hour 25 has interviews with SF authors, all downloadable as MP3.
Prairie Home Companion, in Real format.
http://www.bnac.biz/downloads/talesoftheafternow/
I only have the 128k versions myself, but it's a VERY good story. I personally can't wait for Season 4!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
1. About ten years ago, my job required me to make a 1,000 mile road trip about twice a year. I would just get a box and address it to the local library. Then I would check out a whole bunch of audio tapes (no CD player back then). When I got to my destination, I would just put all the tapes in the box and mail them back to the library.
2. When I was a kid, CBS had this program called CBS Radio Mystery Theatre. This was back in the 70s -- the program received a lot of publicity at the time, as an attempt to "revive" the radio-drama format. I was poking around USENET a while back, and lo and behold, found that a community of CBSRMT fans had lovingly restored and were posting, in rotation, most of the old episodes.
I wouldn't advocate doing anything illegal, but on the other hand, there's no other place you can obtain these old broadcasts -- at least, not to my knowledge.
The episodes were intro'ed by E.G. Marshall, and the quality of the voice acting is excellent. The writing itself is pretty uneven, but some of them are excellent and quite memorable. The newsgroup is alt.binaries.cbs.radio.mystery.theatre, or something like that.
- AJ
My two cents on this since I just converted the 17 disc Harry Potter to bookmarkable AAC. I used iTunes 4.9 to rip the CDs using the new Podcast "optimize for voice" preset. NOTE: Bigger files are supposed to be more skip prone and eat more battery life due to the way the hd & cache are handled so I kept my files to single chapters which were about 40 minutes each, encoded at 64kbps.
I used "Join Tracks" to gather each chapter into an individual file), but a few chapters were spread over 2 consecutive discs and I wanted to combine them, so I used mp4box (Windows, Linux, but not OS X) to losslessly concatenate the AAC files. I then manually used a hex editor to change the file type from "M4A " to "M4B " and changed the file extension from .m4a to .m4b and changed the genre from "Books & Spoken" to "Audiobook". (AFAIK the rename trick only works on Windows, while the hex editing also works on OS X) Created a Smart Playslist for the whole set of files and enjoyed.
A few more possibly useful links MarkAble (Windows only) is supposed to help automate the process I went through, but I'm not sure how it concatenates the files and wanted to learn, and the aforementioned Doug's Applescripts has Join Together (OS X only), but that requires QTPro and it is still not clear whether this is a lossless concatenation or not.
BalamThe Dawn and Drew show, of course. You'll be laughing your ass off all the way.
Im surprised no one mentioned Sci-Fi Channels site section called 'Seeing Ear Theatre' with Fantasy and SciFi stuff for listening, granted its online listening but you can rip it and have a LOT to listen to. Ranging from humour to serious, drama to horror, campy to chilling...
/. I thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this resource.
http://www.scifi.com/set
This being
Looking for an open source replacement for
a. Audio book CD converted to mp3
b. MS Windows Media Player
c. Speedup media player to 1.4 time speed
d. Adjust equalizer to not play anything above 4khz.
MS does a good job of deleting dead space and the 1.4 times speedup is amazing.
There's some old style radio dramas called Imagination Theater (most recent episodes are here, in real media (gag)) the quality is variable, but most of the Sherlock Holmes ones are alright. They broadcast on a lot of stations in the us (station guide), and they have a few cds available for your buying pleasure.
SAILING MISHAP
I could think that producing an audio book or two would be an excellent term project for high school or junior college level drama students. All you'd need is a comfortable, sound proof room, a good microphone (or two) connected to a computer, and a simple audio editor and a text to read. If the local library does not have an old public domain book, something can be printed out from Project Gutenberg.
September is still far enough away that an audio book project could be planned easily. There are far fewer technical distractions in producting audio than with video.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
http://www.itconversations.com/
If you're interested in science fiction or fantasy, you should check out Escape Pod. We podcast fun short stories each week, with some flash fiction bonuses and the occasional review, and it's all free.
ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
j00 sh0uld try catching one of them 1337 p0dcasts in your iPod... some I hear are very 1337.
Am I 1337 yet?
Jim Kelly is a SF writer who has recordings of some of his stories (around 10), read by him, on his site. Check them out. http://www.jimkelly.net/pages/free_reads.htm
For those who don't mind finding ways to download streaming content -
http://publicradiofan.com/