Submitted by eddycurrents on Mon, 09/08/2003 - 5:03pm

I bought a wee portable flash MP3 player a few months ago. I chose the MPIO FL-100 because it was very small, has lots of memory, has FM radio and voice recorder functions, and has some features perfect for audiobooks: it has a fast forward, rewind, and it will automatically start playing where it left off.

I downloaded a couple of audiobooks off the internet... ok I didn't pay for them exactly but I did own the books... anyway, it worked like gangbusters and I was hooked.

I slip this little fella in a pocket when I leave in the morning, and anytime during the day when I have a few minutes to kill -- and it's amazing how many of those times there are -- I pop in my earbuds and listen to a few minutes of my book. Time spent idling in traffic or standing in lineups is no longer wasted time.

Last month, I had a 5 1/2 hour flight, in economy (ugh). I listened to an audiobook while standing in the check-in line, while boarding the plane, throughout the entire flight, while picking up my luggage, and during the taxi ride to the hotel. Bloody marvellous! Rather antisocial too, but oh well.

I find reading on a plane gives me a neckache, but with an audiobook you just lean back and close your eyes. Plus, I find reading while driving causes me to swerve. Audiobooks are much safer.

I downloaded some public domain audiobooks (yes there are a few), but once I was done all the freebies, I felt guilty about pirating, so I looked around. Buying audiobooks in a bookstore costs a fortune, and they come on tapes or CDs that you have to convert (time consuming process) to MP3.

Then I found Audible.com. Their audiobooks come already in MP3 format (kinda, see below) and are much cheaper than a pack of CDs. Or you can subscribe: for $15 per month, you get 2 audiobooks up front and 1 per month thereafter, plus 1 audio magazine or newspaper per month. For $20 per month, you get 3 audiobooks up front and 2 every month thereafter. You can always buy more audiobooks at regular club prices (which like I said, are much cheaper than in a bookstore and they are already in MP3).

The catch is, and it's a biggie: they don't really come in MP3 format. They come in Audible's own format, which can only be played on your computer or on one of their supported players (there are actually a lot of supported players).

Or you can burn them to CDs, but then you have to convert all those CDs back to MP3. It's like the bookstore in reverse... then forward again.

The reason they do this is for copyright protection. Their special format makes it harder to indiscriminately copy the books and send them around.

And it's actually a very good format: very high compression ratios with little loss of voice quality. It's much better than MP3. Plus -- and this is cool -- it has a place marker, so if you stop listening to the audiobook and then listen to music on your player for a while, then go back to the audiobook, it starts up again exactly where you left off.

HOWEVER... I don't have one of their special players, so I had to find a way around all this. GoldWave (shareware) can copy their special format and convert it to MP3. (You have to use version 3.5 of the AudibleManager software though, the newer version blocks the copy.)

Then I use CoolMP3 Splitter to split the big long MP3 file that Goldwave spits out into 1 hour chunks. That way, if I lose my place, it doesn't take so long to fast forward or rewind back to it. I also found a piece of software to rename a group of files and another to set up a group of MP3 tags.

All this takes time, but not much of yours. You just let the software chug away.

And it works! I just bought audiobook versions of Stephen King's "From a Buick 8" and Robert Jordan's "Crossroads of Twilight". They are in MP3 format in 1 hour chunks on my hard drive.

FYI, "From a Buick 8" is around 15 hours long, so it's in 15 individual MP3 files. Total is around 183 MB in MP3 format.

"Crossroads of Twilight" is a whopping 26 hours long, so it's in 26 individual files. Total is around 342 MB in MP3 format. When I downloaded it in Audible's special format, it was only 91 MB. That's good compression!

Windows media format is much better at compressing voice than MP3, as well. MP3 is the most portable though.

If you want more details of how I did all this, which software I used, which compressions I used, let me know.

Of course, if you buy one of the MP3 players that Audible supports, you can just use their (superior) format and you don't need to mess with any of that conversion stuff.