iPod playlists.

[SackAttack]

We had a thread not too long ago about "What comes up randomly on your iPod?"

Kind of along the same lines, I thought I'd pose the question: how many playlists do you have on your iPod, and what sort of breakdown do you use?

My iPod looks like this, at the moment:

Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three:
Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
Dark Tower IV: Wizard & Glass
Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
Hearts In Atlantis
Discworld: Night Watch
Christmas
Country
Rock 'n Roll
Piano Rock
Miscellaneous (anything that doesn't fit in one of the four previous categories, at the moment)
Short Stories

I have ten separate playlists devoted to spoken-word content, for which I have Audible to thank. I'd have that reduced summat, but I haven't figured out yet how to make stacking playlists (so I could have a master Dark Tower playlist with each book being a separate playlist within the master). Not even sure that can be done.

Anyway, those're my playlists. What've you guys got?

[Honolulu_Blue]

Sack,

I have an Audible account as well. I haven't downloaded anything to the i-pod yet. I heard that there were no chapters and this was a problem. My brother downloaded a book and found it hard to keep his place whenever the i-pod ran out of batteries, etc. Anyway around this for books?

[SirFozzie]

Since this has turned into a Praise Audible thread :)

I once sent SackAttack my list of purchases from Audible.

His response, "DAMN Foz... where do you find time to listen to em all!"

Especially since the series we both like are Unabridged Fantasy/Sci Books that have a running time of 50 hours or so :)

Also, I like the IPod remembering where you were in an audiobook, I haven't had any problems with batteries dying yet, so I dunno about what you said there, H_B

[jetpunk2000]

Excuse my stupidity, but what is Audible? :confused: :confused: :confused:

[SirFozzie]

Audible is a audio book site that offers audiobooks for sale (at about half of what it would cost from specialty audiobook stores). But the true savings come from being part of the Audible Listener's club. Each month you get two books of your choice (no matter how much they cost) for $19.95. (SInce Audiobooks are EXPENSIVE.. this is a great savings)

They can be imported directly into your IPOD (as one big file per audiobook, although many bigger books are divided into chunks (probably to avoid the HD throwing a shit fit at loading 150 MB into memory at one go ;))

They offer differing quality version of the audio books (since the higher quality books can be 100 MB or so, remember these are 50 Hour books! :D)

[SirFozzie]

Oh. direct link

www.audible.com

[SackAttack]

Sack,

I have an Audible account as well. I haven't downloaded anything to the i-pod yet. I heard that there were no chapters and this was a problem. My brother downloaded a book and found it hard to keep his place whenever the i-pod ran out of batteries, etc. Anyway around this for books?

H_B, I haven't had any problems with this. There are no chapters, but the iPod does store your place when you pause the book, even if the batteries die, which makes resuming it a snap. The thing is, when the iPod battery "dies," it's not really out of charge. It still maintains a tiny bit so as to keep your place in whatever you were listening to and give you time to recharge it. If you wait a week to recharge it, then yeah, you run the risk of having to start over.

If you're recharging it fairly soon after it dies, then you have nothing to worry about.

[SackAttack]

Audible is a audio book site that offers audiobooks for sale (at about half of what it would cost from specialty audiobook stores). But the true savings come from being part of the Audible Listener's club. Each month you get two books of your choice (no matter how much they cost) for $19.95. (SInce Audiobooks are EXPENSIVE.. this is a great savings)

What Foz said, except I believe the price is $21.95. Still nothing to sneeze at. Plus, every so often Audible has these $9.95 sales where you can pick up books on the cheap if you're an Audible member (which is free) even if you're not an AudibleListener.

They can be imported directly into your IPOD (as one big file per audiobook, although many bigger books are divided into chunks (probably to avoid the HD throwing a shit fit at loading 150 MB into memory at one go ;))

The HD doesn't load it all up at once in any event. I suspect the books are divided into chunks less for the sake of your device and more for the sake of courtesy to those users who don't have broadband yet.

They offer differing quality version of the audio books (since the higher quality books can be 100 MB or so, remember these are 50 Hour books! :D)

I use the "3" format, and Dark Tower VII was close to 140 MB between the four chunks, just as a frame of reference. But on a 20 gig iPod, that doesn't bug me much.

Plus, the thing Foz /didn't/ mention, is that once you buy a book from Audible, you can reaccess it whenever. If you put it on your iPod, listen to it, and then delete it, you can always restore it later at no extra charge, so the size of the books is only relevant to how much space is left on your iPod or other Audible-capable device.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled thread?

[SirFozzie]

One bad thing: You CANNOT use the audiobook file through winamp or mp3 players, it uses a digitally encrypted format that ITunes can read (due to Apple partnering with Audible), but most MP3 player formats cannot.

You CAN burn to audio disk.. but ONLY in audio CD format (meaning 1 CD for every 70 minutes of audiobook)

[SackAttack]

One bad thing: You CANNOT use the audiobook file through winamp or mp3 players, it uses a digitally encrypted format that ITunes can read (due to Apple partnering with Audible), but most MP3 player formats cannot.

You CAN burn to audio disk.. but ONLY in audio CD format (meaning 1 CD for every 70 minutes of audiobook)

If you're talking about software mp3 players, you're correct. I was referring to an actual digital music device, as there are several other brands besides iPod that support the format. iPod just generally has the greatest capacity for such.