(off topic) How to enjoy "free" Audiobooks from the Web
- From: "orang37" <orang37@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:41:20 GMT
With floodwaters coming down the street now and heavy rain falling I can't think
of anything better that I can do than interrupt my listening to the 9th. hour of
Winston Churchill's history of the second world war than to share how you can
acquire "freely" a nice libaray of audiobooks from the internet. Your choice of
science-fiction, fiction, humor, best-sellers, biography, non-fiction, books on
finance, lecture series on art and history from some of the world's leading
professors, etc.
I have found as my eyes are older and weaker that I have to budget the amount of
time I spend reading every day because I am doing technical work as well as
research. I find listening to audiobooks a wonderful way to pursue my lifelong
habit of voracious reading, and I find there's nothing better than to lie back
in a comfortable position with my cat on my lap in kind of a relaxed state
listening to a lecture series on the history of ancient Greece, or listening to
a supernatural thriller like "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova.
I have been using EasyNews subscription news service for three years (it's US
$9.95 per month), and highly recommend it. They now allow up to 30 gigabytes of
downloads per month (if you can download that much a month hats off to you) !
The link to EasyNews is below as well as a brief description of how it works.
I am going to do this in the form of a FAQ type outline :
Summary : Audiobooks are usually collections of .mp3 format files found usenet
newsgroups whose titles begin with "alt.binaries. To access them you need
reliable access to the usenet binary groups which your ISP may or may not
provide. Advantages of using a commercial News Reader service described. Issues
in file formats briefly mentioned.
1. What is an audiobook : a file or collection of files typically in .mp3
format of a person(s) reading the text of a published work, or of a lecture
series as might be delivered in a college classroom. Rarely these have musical
effects or soundtracks added. Most often they are one reader reading the
complete work.
2. Are these copyrighted, commercially sold materials : yes, they generally
are.
3. By downloading copies of them am I stealing : you decide.
4. How do I get them and play them : you get them from Usenet news groups that
begin with the title "alt.binaries" You play them the same way you play .mp3
files now.
5. What is the Usenet : part of the world web wide, but not in html format, it
is host to thousands of newsgroups ranging from serious discussion forums for
photography and jewelry making to porn and utterly bizarre groups, to discussion
forums like soc.culture.thai
6. What are "binary" groups : these are groups where files are posted; these
files may include music, video, audiobooks, software, porn, etc. The main
newsgroups for audiobooks are :
As of 19:05PM 29 September Thai Time : Current usenet groups
containing audiobook files on EasyNews :
Note : the number in parentheses is the number of files currently
retained on each group right now EasyNews' servers :
(37241) alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks
(31814) alt.binaries.sounds.audiobooks
(24998) alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks.highspeed
(9120) alt.binaries.sounds.audiobooks.repost
(8302) alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.audiobooks
(316) alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks.repost
(103) alt.binaries.audiobooks
7. How do I get access to the Usenet news groups : if you are reading this you
are already accessing the Usenet ! Yes, you can "see" them using the same reader
you use to access soc.culture.thai, but what you see will depend on what your
ISP decides to store on its servers : see #8 below.
8. Then how do I get access to the binary groups : here is a "challenge" your
ISP may or may not support the binary newsgroups. If they do support them, they
may not do a good job of "catching" all the files that belong together which
means you might download 99 components of a file only to find the 100th.
component is not stored on your ISP's server and so you can't put all 100
components together to create the final file.
9. Do you mean a single file is divided into sub-files : yes, because large
files can get corrupted easily and do not propagate as well as collections of
smaller files, the "master" file is usually divided up into pieces : these may
be in different formats, but most often are zip files. These are, today, most
commonly encoded using yEnc encoding. Note that .mp3 music files, typically 5-12
megabytes in size, lend themselves nicely to being put up as is. Many audiobooks
are put on the usenet groups as groups of .mp3 files that do not require
assembly into a larger file.
10. Okay I found the files and I downloaded them, but how do I "piece them
together" : here you are going to have to know how to use your particular
browser to do this. Look into your browser's help file and look up topics like
"binary," "download."
11. Okay, my ISP doesn't have the binary files, or they do a poor job of
catching the complete files : well, you can use a News Reading service.
12. What is a News Reading service : a company like EasyNews, SuperNews, that
offers a subscription service : you access their servers, which they promise do
a very good job of catching all the files available, through an internet front
end.
13. What is an "internet front end" to a News Reading service : okay : you go
to an html page, a regular web page like :
http://www.EasyNews.com
you log in with username and password. you select which usenet groups
you want to monitor. they present you with a list of the newsgroups you've
chosen to monitor, and you select one. a listing of the files is shown, you
check the files you want to download and they package them up into a zipped file
for you. then you go to their download manager page and click the zipped file to
download. once you have the file downloaded you unzip and then either
re-assemble the master file from its components ... or, as is typically the case
with audiobooks, just load the .mp3 files into your media player and play them.
14. How do you actually re-assemble the component files into the master file :
well, component files are often in .rar format, and you need a program like
WinRAR on Windows to do the right thing to resurrect the master file. See :
http://www.win-rar.com/index.php?id=24&kb=1&kb_article_id=162
15. What if I am missing a file or two : there is a new way of encoding that
has become very popular where certain files called "PAR" files are put up along
with the component files. Using a program you can use the (smaller) PAR files to
"resurrect" missing files. This gets esoteric : see :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par_file
for more information on PAR files.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Prev by Date: Re: Thais are slaves!
- Next by Date: OT: 79 Virgin Males?
- Previous by thread: Re: Myanmar's relentless efforts on narcotic drug elimination have once again been ignored by the United States
- Next by thread: Re: (off topic) How to enjoy "free" Audiobooks from the Web
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
