Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Hm-m. This sounds workable, sort of:

1) Buy the Audible audiobook (oops, left out -- step 0) Install the Audible Manager software)
2) Buy the recording software (Nero 8 -- $80 Windows, $25 Linux; free 2-week trial available)
or
2) Obtain Apple iTunes to burn the CD
3) Install the Audible plugin
3) Burn a CD to a virtual disk. This will have CD tracks, not .aa files.
4) Install the software to mount a virtual disk.
5) Use that software to mount your CD
6) Rip the CD tracks to mp3's
7) Copy the .mp3's to your NIT or other .mp3 player
or
7) Install the Nokia Audiobook Manager
8) Convert the .mp3's on the virtual CD to .awb format
9) Copy the .awb files to your NIT and play in Media Player

(Updated for accuracy/completeness)

I've never burned a CD with iTunes, but presumably this isn't something that costs anything.

And once you've assembled all the software pieces, it's really just convert-and-burn to CD then rip to mp3. And then convert again if you want, to get smaller .awb files.

(I believe .awb is used with speech files compressed using the AMR wide-band codec, and .amr with files using AMR narrow-band. Apparently Media Player handles them both already, referring to them collectively as AMR files. As its name suggests, AMR WB encompasses a wider range of frequencies than AMR NB, which tosses out anything you can't hear over your POTS phone anyway.)

I've specified each step, so that someone visiting the forums in the future can just cut to the chase and read this thread to know what to do. Thanks, JoeF! (And thanks also to Benson, for pointing out a step I had overlooked.)

Added later: The only experience I have is ripping CD tracks to mp3 and to wav formats; it's possible that some software might be able to rip the tracks directly to awb or amr, thus removing one coding/decoding generation and simplifying things a bit.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Well, I'm a radical on this issue. I think "intellectual" property is as indefensible as "human" property, and I think copyright will be discarded, much as slavery was.

But then, I think the underpinnings of the notion of physical property are also indefensible intellectually (how do you "own" land?), so I don't expect everyone to agree with me.*

Knowing that I can probably find a route from an Audible recording to my NIT if I try hard enough is good enough for me. And since moving music from one physical format to another has legal protections**, I'm content to stay within the moral area of "I paid once already" and leave the copyright provocations to others (copyright provocateurs, I guess) for now.

Roger

_______________
* It hasn't stopped me from working in publishing my entire career, for instance.

** IANAL (Isn't it weird that this situation comes up often enough in online discussions that "I am not a lawyer" has its own acronym?)

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

With an M2?

(In fact, I'm a serious property-rights libertarian / Austrian / that kinda guy, and could pitch into a discussion on this; but that's not what this thread is for, so I'm going for the quick joke instead.)

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Meh, then it should be Glock 40 then :p

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Nah, Glock 18's better. (What's a Glock 40, anyway? not listed in Wikipedia)
And for anyone who doesn't have a clue what Austrian (school) means in this context: http://mises.org/web/3467#Austrian_Economics

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Perhaps I should have phrased this as "I don't expect everyone agrees with me" or even "I suspect not many people agree with me."

And I'm not proposing any alternative to the systems that have arisen in human history. There may be no practical system with the tenets to which I subscribe.

Still, I would hope that our Glück didn't have to depend on a Glock.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Nitpick; I think your virtual CD will have cd audio tracks, not a filesystem with mp3s, so you'll have to rip+encode to mp3, or rip+encode to amr...

See, we libertarians are nice folk; even help out a socialist/anarcho-utopist like you. :p

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

or just spend $50-$150 on a dedicated MP3 player that fully supports Audible already. Thus saving the 100's of hours wasted on conversion for a library. Plus a dedicated player will offer significantly better battery life saving the NIT's power for other uses.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

and give you one more thing to schlep around.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

RogerS, may I suggest you Edit this post to incorporate Post #47, to best fulfill your goal.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

RogerS, you might be interested in the book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. Somewhere online I found a download of the whole book as a .txt or .prc or something, but here it is as pdf.

(I don't agree with you or them, but I do think the patent and copyright periods should be much shorter. While commercial life has sped up since 1776, protection periods have gotten longer, which makes no sense. Unless you're a Disney shareholder. They should have gotten shorter.)

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Or better yet, get a copy of Goldwave or River Past Audio Converter (version 5.0) and convert those .aa files to mp3 files so you can play them anywhere, anytime. As a plus you can just play them on your Nxx and save yourself from spending $50-150 and carrying another device.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

You can convert the .aa files to mp3, but there is still no player for the NXX that will play audiobooks (with bookmarking or resume function). I still carry my Zire 31 to play audiobooks.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

jldiaz made a script that resumes mplayer.

Re: Nokia Audiobooks: what we need to hear
 

Thanks for the tip. I'm not sure though, that this is a solution I'll find handy. Manually typing in commands to operate a mp3 player is kind of counter to what you buy a tablet device for. If I get desperate I'll give it a try. The Zire 31 still works and is not too bulky to carry around. Unfortunately the sound from the N800 isn't loud enough through the earphones anyway.