[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [ARSCLIST] Preservation media WAS: Cataloguing still :-)
I engineered hundreds of audiobooks in the analog and cassette days
(thousands if not millions of razor-blade edits of mouth noises and
breaths - I can claim to be a Master Editor from sheer expereince
alone, when I need to brag) and the cassette releases were always so
embarrasing to hear. I tried to keep at least a DAT copy of the master
whenever there was one I wanted to listen to again.
Lately I have been producing audiobooks for local authors, sort of like
the "vanity press" days, and would dearly love to know how to code
chapters in longer works and make them downloadable as a unit but still
play tracks. Anyone have hints on how to find that out? I have two or
three projects in the works that would benefit hugely from that! I
thought it was Audible that developed that method; at least that was
the first place I saw it, but their audio quality was abominable and I
discontinued using them after one purchase. I would guess iTunes took
the technology from them, as there has been quite a bit of crossover
between them... Anyone know about that?
I have one project about to see release where the author just decided
to do MP3s instead of physical CDs, and she can just barely wrap her
mind around it - she actually asked me in a session, "what is an ipod,
anyway?" and I felt like quoting the line in my sig here, but didn't,
as I wanted to educate her...
<L>
Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689
Fats Waller as he left the bandstand was asked what jazz was.
He replied, "Lady, if you don't know by now, don't mess with it"
On Sep 2, 2006, at 5:59 PM, Tom Fine wrote:
Even audiobooks, which only recently have dropped the cassette format
en masse, are getting with the 21st century and usually offer
illustration material or other non-audio content, or sometimes and
author interview, on the final disc of a set. By the way, audiobooks
do their format a huge service by killing off cassette releases. The
general rule was bottom-basement tape quality and duped by cavemen in
a cave. Audibility was always an iffy proposition. CDs, the quality is
better and consistent. And, they got around the "resume quandry" (ie
many CD players don't have a resume function, although that's been
solved in recent years) by putting track cuts every 3 minutes or so.
Thus, worst case, you'd have to re-listen to 2:59 the next time you
put the CD in the player. And the iTunes coders got into the act and
put in the option to stitch all cuts on a CD together for more
convenient loading of audiobooks into an iPod. I'd suggest the final
convenience for audiobooks would be to include an unlock code on one
of the CD's that allows the user to download the book from the iTunes
store, already crunched to digi-compressed format and ready to load
into the iPod.