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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.
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.
The parent poster beat me to it. I highly recommend episodes of T.A.L. Depending on what OS you run, there are many options for transcoding these to MP3.
Here are some of my favorite episodes:
Telephone - Dad suspects that his child is using drugs. He secretly taps his son's phone line and is amazed at what he hears.
The Middle of Nowhere - The chronicle of a T.A.L. producer's fight with MCI to get a $950 overcharge reversed. Plus, the tiny island nation of Nauru and it's nefarious global reach.
Teenage Embed, Part 1 and Teenage Embed, Part 2. A Californian teenager of Afghan heritage travels to Afghanistan with his dad, who works for President Hamid Karzai. Fascinating.
Somewhere in the Arabian Sea - A week aboard the US aircraft carrier, USS John C. Stennis, during Operation Enduring Freedom.
The First Day - Itenerant pot-scrubber, "Dishwasher Pete", takes a job aboard an offshore drilling platform and prepares for the worst.
Backed Into a Corner - Quizno's employee runs store for a month after the owners vanish. Also, a great story about a truck driver who cannot read.
Oh, and how can I forget? Should I Stay or Should I Go?, the story of two Apple Computer employees who are laid off when their project is cancelled but continue to show up to work everyday, sneaking in the door and hiding out in unused conference rooms, in order to complete their project.
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.
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
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