Now with added audio
Well, I hope so, anyway. Installed the thingy, tinkered with the wotsit – let me see if I can summon Rupert for the occasion …
Microwave your head with an audiobook
“There are tens of thousands of audiobooks available in the world, in various languages, ranging all the way from education to entertainment.”
http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/audiobooks
One thousand of those books are, of course, by LibriVox. In a kind acknowledgement of that, when demonstrating beta software, Nokia have converted a few LV books to play as minature-size audio files on some of their mobile phones. Splendidly, when they were choosing five out of our wide range — they included Freud’s Dream Psychology, which I contributed a chapter to.
With regard to the freeness: our books are all free, the compression format is an open standard, and the converting software is freeware. Plus a chap from Nokia took the time to sign up to the LV forum to assure us of the latter, which gets them added Nice People points, too.
I don’t have a mobile myself, and obviously I can’t condone people irradiating their head just to listen to me, (though I will be flattered,) but I’m sure with some kind of hands-free equipment, and an adequate shielding of tin-foil, owners of various mobile devices can benefit safely. Enjoy!
Hear me - lots!
Just finished making a static page which lists and links all of my recordings so far. Since I’ve completed 179, this has taken a while. Still, it’s a good list. And hopefully keeping it current won’t be too complicated, since a fair bit of what I record now, I am also organising behind the scenes (BCing or MCing in LV terms), so I’ll know exactly when it goes into the catalogue.
http://piratelibrary.com/hear-me/
After a bit of tinkering with a spreadsheet, I can say that this represents 35 hrs 46 mins of audio. Not counting podcasts, King Lear or Life in the Clearings, since I didn’t actually talk for very much of those (and it’s probably balanced by including all of the group readings - The Monkey’s Paw and Many Voices.) It also doesn’t count recordings completed but not yet catalogued, which will take me over 40 hours.
My longest single recording is 49 mins, the shortest 40secs (hardly time to get the disclaimer out! Hoorah poetry!) Longest work is The Water-babies, at just over 7 hrs.
My first podcast! “Sucking at recording audiobooks: and how not to!”
Podcast - A LibriVox community show … of which there is one each week, and for which we were a bit short of hosts a fortnight ago, so, I thought, ‘I have a fortnight, why not!’
Dozens of messages to hand-picked readers and 12 days later, and I have a folder on my computer with oodles of funny snippets, and a very imminent deadline — which I beat. Ha! A podcast, for the uninitiated, is a geek-glamour phrase for online radioshow, and can be music, news, chat or me burbling earnestly away, punctuated by goodwilled contributors. It’s an mp3 file, so if you’ve ever downloaded any other audio I’ve linked, you can listen to it in the same way. If you happen to have an iPod, you’ll have a moral obligation to use that to listen with.
The podcast’s aimed at LibriVoxers present and potential, and lists some of the ways readings can suck, and what you-the-reader might do to avoid that hideous fate (bearing in mind LV is NOT a professional outfit and WILL accept almost any file, provided it’s basically audible and provably public domain. (But hey, it’s free. Come and do better if you like.) So this is mostly ironic, in a not-actually-very-ironic-at-all sort of way.) Feedback’s been mostly good so far, with some interesting negatives pointed out. More welcome :)
Direct link: (19MB file, 38 mins) http://www.archive.org/download/librivox_community/
librivox_community_podcast_54_64kb.mp3
Indirect link: (20th Sept 2007) http://www.archive.org/details/librivox_community
Exhausting, fun, might do another one, sometime not soon.