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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!"
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
NASCAR radio?
The Tampax car, #7 is taking a hard left followed closely by the Jack Daniels #16. The race is between these two cars folks. Tampax takes another left into the straight-away! J.D. is right on his tail pipes. They speed into the straight-away and OH! There's another wild left-turn! Oh the insanity! Another high-speed straight-away! Jack Daniels #16 makes a move but the #7 Tampax car cuts him off at the pass AS HE GOES INTO A LEFT TURN! Oh my GOLLY GOSH this is exciting! Looks like J.D. is taking the inside of the turn hoping to squeeeeze past Tampax -- boy I'll bet that's hard. Not much gets past Tampax these days! Woo! Looks like ol' Jack finally made it and Tampax floors it to regain first position! Oh What's this! Looks like the Tampax #7 is leaking fluid! Oh the horror! #7 is losing speed as it sprays fluid all over the track. The yellow flag comes out as the rest of the pack BLOWS right by #7.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
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
In fact, you might even hear about an interesting place or event, and take the opportunity to *gasp* interact with people who aren't just like you.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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 would agree, to a point. I got into podcasting through TWIT, which is done by people with TV and radio expirence. However, alot of podcasters do not have this expirence, and while their efforts are appreciated, amount to unlistenable dreck. I recently bought a sirius receiver, so i cut back the amount of average quality podcasts i listen to. Now, its just TWIT, and thats merely because I like to hear some of my favorite former techtv personalities talk about current subjects (except dvorak. Cant stand the episodes that they bring that prick on)
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
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.