#geek work

As a 40-something adult who spends 2+ hours on the bus 5 days a week, audiobooks have become my primary means of consuming fiction. I still read books, and even moreso now that I have a wonderful little Kobo Touch ebook reader, but I go through a lot more in the 2 hours I have on the bus while going to and from work. When I read a book, I essentially read it aloud in my head, putting together voices and mannerisms for the characters, so listening to the narrators' performances really plays on that for me.

Many years ago, I started off downloading torrents full of audiobooks, compressed as MP3s, as I couldn't afford to purchase them. At that time, the ones I could find were mostly done from cassette tape sources, and had been so heavily compressed to reduce their size that the voices fuzzed and warbled. This was mostly okay, as MP3 players at the time didn't come in the multi-gigabyte formats they do now. I got truly hooked by a copy of The Hobbit, narrated by Robert Inglis, a Shakespearean actor, pulled in by the way he set out the various characters in voice.

Then, about 4 years ago, I discovered that the city library here had tons of books on CD, and their library was constantly increasing. I started off with some of my favorites by Sir Terry Pratchett, from his Discworld series, and decided to see what kind of audio quality I could get. These proved a bit challenging, as he's rarely used chapter markers in anything but his books for kids (which are also excellent books, by the way). That said, he did what I saw as logical breaks in the narrative by inserting "* * *" at various points, so I took those a chapter points.

I ripped the audio from the CDs using CDex with lots of error correction, saving it out as full stereo WAV files instead of MP3s. I swear, the discs went back to the library in better shape than I got them in, as I usually had to clean fingerprints and gods only know what else off of the CDs to get them to read cleanly. I'd then sort out where the chapter breaks were, listening through WinAmp to find the timing of the breaks, noting it down on paper or renaming the files. Next, I'd load it up into Roxio's Sound Editor tool, splitting it at the noted points, and joining the various audio tracks for each chapter together into a single, monaural WAV file, as I don't need to hear someone read in stereo. I even went to the trouble to strip out the "this ends disc x" and "disc y" outros and intros, so that the narrative performance wasn't interrupted by them, yanking me out the story. Finally, I'd compress the WAVs into MP3s using the special "voice" settings, then tag them up and add cover art using what I could find on Amazon or Google's image search.

Anyhoo, I've amassed a fairly big set of audiobooks with great audio quality. :) I enjoy the whole process, though I could do without the few cases where previous listeners have gouged the CDs so badly that no amount of error correction can read through it.