Author Topic: A whiny complaint about Podiobooks  (Read 18103 times)

goatkeeper

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Reply #25 on: April 03, 2008, 05:34:37 PM
I have a dream- that one day all file formats and players will learn to get along



stePH

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Reply #26 on: April 03, 2008, 05:59:30 PM
I have a dream- that one day all file formats and players will learn to get along

Would you consider Betamax and HD-DVD to be martyrs to the cause?  :P

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StankGunner

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Reply #27 on: April 03, 2008, 11:24:19 PM
In the far off land of make believe, Apple is about to announce its first open source media player.

Seriously though, something like the iPhone can have a big impact on this.  They are going to be releasing a SDK for relatively cheap to the public which is going to allow people to do a bunch of cool things, but while they are doing that, the bleeding edge people are just going to hack it and do what ever they want. 

Another good example of this is the PSP.  It really is a pretty cool piece of hardware now, and it even has some decent games.  The trouble is that no one is buying the games because they just hack the PSP and pirate all the games they want, plus add features like emulation and other cool things.

For so long companies have been trying to get into your home so that they can make you a customer for life.  Gilette wasn't trying to make a profit selling razors, they knew that they were going to make their profit selling razor blades.  Same thing with any game console, you aren't going to make your money from this system..well except Nintendo.

This business model has worked for such a long time because there was never much of a fear of competition from the consumers.  You needed money to be able to develop a successful competing product.  But these days we aren't talking about a physical object like a razor blade.  The entry cost to write out some code is null when you take into account that most people already have a computer and likely an internet connection.

I don't know how it will be monetized, but as soon as a company can start putting out an open source device that has name recognition, it will be all over for proprietary systems. 



wintermute

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Reply #28 on: April 03, 2008, 11:30:28 PM
In the far off land of make believe, Apple is about to announce its first open source media player.

If you want open-source media players, I recommend looking at RockBox, which I run on my iRiver H320. I hear iPodLinux is good, too.

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Nt 2 B TKN INTRNLY

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Reply #29 on: April 04, 2008, 01:30:36 AM
I still love my zune  ;)

[...] it will be all over for proprietary systems. 

I'm not sure here... Is this a good thing, or a bad one? I'm somewhere in between on it.

I wonder what it would be like to feel my brain...


StankGunner

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Reply #30 on: April 05, 2008, 02:30:39 AM
In the far off land of make believe, Apple is about to announce its first open source media player.

If you want open-source media players, I recommend looking at RockBox, which I run on my iRiver H320. I hear iPodLinux is good, too.

Hey, Rockbox looks pretty cool.  I may have to install that, it does say you can dual boot with it, which would be helpful in efforts to wean myself off of Itunes as a Podcast services.  I had heard of Podzilla (iPod Linux) before, but the last time I had checked it wasn't supported by my 5.5G iPod.  Looking at it now, it apparently is, so I might check that out as well.

I still love my zune  ;)

[...] it will be all over for proprietary systems. 

I'm not sure here... Is this a good thing, or a bad one? I'm somewhere in between on it.

I am not trying to sound like some sort of "rip down the establishment" nutjob here, but I do think that better features will come out if the development was open to who ever wanted to try out an idea.  The best chance of a good, open device coming out on the market will be when the wireless spectrum is implemented.  Right now, because the cell phone companies can dictate who uses their networks, they control all of the competition on that network.  Once competition can happen not between networks, but on them, companies wont be able to say "Hey, you wanna use Verizon? Hope you like your crappy Razor."  Once people start to realize that they things they are carrying around in their pockets have more in common with computers than they do phones, I hope they will start wondering why they can't do many of the fun things they can on their computers wherever they go.

There are tons of little things that I wish I could change about my iPod.  If it was supported as open source then I could find a way to really make it into the kind of device I wanted it to be.  If iTunes could stand on an even playing field with an open sourced piece of software that could interface with the iPod, then they could actually have some competition.

Widgets are a big thing right now, and that is thanks, in no small part, to Apple.  It would be fantastic to see some sort of widget system implemented in iTunes.



david51

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Reply #31 on: April 23, 2008, 05:58:24 AM
I've heard that one can put chapters into .m4a / .m4b files, but I'm completely unclear as to how to do it.  Currently I just rip each chapter as a separate file when converting CD audiobooks.

You might be interested in Chapter Master, which I released a couple of weeks ago.  It has a fully-fledged GUI.



http://www.rightword.com.au/products/chaptermaster



david51

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Reply #32 on: April 23, 2008, 06:42:09 AM
I just wanted to add that I also hate plot summaries at the start of audio books.  A number of books available from Audible do this (I think they are from the 'Books on Tape' library).

What's the point of a plot summary that just spoils the interest of listening to the audiobook?  On a hard-copy book you can just ignore the back flap, or whatever, but in an audiobook it is teeth-grindingly annoying.  Unfortunately, with Audible books there's not a lot you can do about it unless they have put in appropriate chapter stops (often not). 

I also HATE music over voice in audiobooks.



smartbombradio

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Reply #33 on: April 24, 2008, 01:43:31 AM
I'm gonna chime in as someone who does put recaps in his stuff. 

I do this for Migration, but I'm going to cut them from the feed if it ever goes to Podiobooks, etc.  I agree they can be annoying when you're hammering through chapter after chapter, but I like them when I'm on the installment plan. 

The problem is that not everyone has a steel trap memory and especially when you're forcing people to wait a week or two between chapters a recap doesn't hurt. 


bolddeceiver

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Reply #34 on: April 24, 2008, 03:34:40 AM
I don't know, it can get annoying at times, but for two reasons I'm OK with it.  First, while I listen to a lot of whole works, I do sometimes listen to them as they come out.  Combine a confusing plot and a slow release schedule (Karl Meade's Odd Jobs being a case in point) and I need the training wheels sometimes.  Since I'm usually listening to at least one or two podcast novels, reading as many as three books, listening to several short fic podcasts, reading SF magazines, etc (short attention span lately, so sue me), sometimes the training wheels are nice.  Also, I find that when I listen to a story, my attention is more apt to wander than when I read.  In a short story, that's fine, if I miss something that breaks the story I just go back and re-listen.  In a novel, you might miss something three episodes back without knowing it, and that reminder can be helpful.



wherethewild

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Reply #35 on: May 09, 2008, 11:25:51 AM
jumping late on the thread, as per usual.

Can't stand recaps. But then I don't bother downloading a podiobook until it's complete because I can't stand waiting either. I swallow novels whole, not chapter at a time with a week in between, so I treat audiobooks the same way.

I just finished Playing for Keeps (side note: the podiobook of Mur's I've enjoyed most so far) and it got really old really fast to have to forward through 6 minutes on each episode to get to the actual story. If an episode is only 20min in total and a quarter of that is in recap, then the recap is far more detailed than it should be. A novel of 80K words shouldn't have a blurb of 20K.

Wormwood (via iTunes, not podiobooks), which I also just finished, did it extremely well with just one or two sentence recaps. It reminded listeners of what characters and key events were relevant to THIS episode.

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Nobilis

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Reply #36 on: June 17, 2008, 03:32:14 AM
When I'm doing a serial in my podcast, I put in recaps because it's been a week since most of my listeners have heard the file.

When we did "A Foolish World" we didn't do recaps.

I think there is a place for them.



stePH

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Reply #37 on: June 17, 2008, 02:46:16 PM
When I'm doing a serial in my podcast, I put in recaps because it's been a week since most of my listeners have heard the file.

When we did "A Foolish World" we didn't do recaps.

I think there is a place for them.

I started listening to "Magical Clothing" when I already had most of the episodes downloaded.  By the time I caught up to current you had already posted the conclusion.  Still, your recaps were just two or three sentences, which I appreciated the brevity of since I had heard the previous episode a day earlier at most.

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Russell Nash

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Reply #38 on: June 17, 2008, 07:11:49 PM
I'm listening to Crescent now and there's 4-7 minutes of crap to skip at the beginning of each episode.  Plus sometimes as much as 3 minutes at the end.



Nobilis

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Reply #39 on: June 19, 2008, 11:21:05 PM
So in short:  Keep them brief.