View Full Version : Help! Christmas!
Unwell_Raptor
8th Nov 2006, 22:33
My dear wife is a great fan of talking books that she rents from the public library. Most are now CDs but a few are still cassettes. I am thinking of buying her an ipod for Christmas, so that we (or rather I) can put the stuff on it and she will have a less cumbersome player to carry.
How hard will that be to do? How long will it take to transfer a 9-CD book to the ipod? What about the cassettes?
Is this a good idea?
Copying CDs to my iPod is startlingly quick. It does it at something like 24x normal read speed - a 1 hour CD takes about 3 minutes.
I've not tried with cassettes: you'd need an interface for them to talk to your PC so that you could get the files onto your PC and in a suitable format for iPod to import them.
P.Pilcher
8th Nov 2006, 23:02
I regret to say that converting your cassettes into mp3 files or whatever will take as tong as it takes to listen to them normally as they will have to be played back into your computer at x1 speed. Any cassette player with a low level output can be used - plug this into the audio in socket on your computer and then you need some recording software to turn this into the required .wav or .mp3 format. I think you can do this with Audacity which is free.
P.P.
Don't forget you can also download 'Podcasts'. Do a search for podcast or look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast for a rundown of what it is.
Here is a place where you can download talking books for free http://www.podiobooks.com/
Also have a look at the BBC Radio website as you can download radio shows, some excellent ones from Radio Four are available as well as all the other stations. All you do is download the programme onto the ipod then listen to it when you like.
I would go for a four or eight gig ipod nano, you can't go much wrong with one of these. :)
When you get the ipod, you will have to download itunes that is included on the instaltion disc that comes with it. Once that is done, it will update to the latest version and you can then look in the itunes shop for talking books etc that you can buy instantly.
It is really easy to be honest, ask Keef!!! :D (Just kidding)....