Audio books from itunes

[JW8725]

Hello anyone listen to any audio books from itunes? They are significantly more expensive than the music there. I was thinking about buying a few books, yes before you ask I'm down for Harry Potter too.

I'm gonna try listen to a book on my new Nano as I work out on my exercise bike. Figured this would be something different to try instead of having the Rocky theme tune on loop (don't laff that stuff works). What is the music format for the audio books? How much can I cram on the 4 gig Nano? Any recommendations too???

 

[wordmunger]

Hello anyone listen to any audio books from itunes? They are significantly more expensive than the music there. I was thinking about buying a few books, yes before you ask I'm down for Harry Potter too.

I'm gonna try listen to a book on my new Nano as I work out on my exercise bike. Figured this would be something different to try instead of having the Rocky theme tune on loop (don't laff that stuff works). What is the music format for the audio books? How much can I cram on the 4 gig Nano? Any recommendations too???

I've bought one audiobook and reviewed it here (That's not my blog, it's the blog of a friend). It was a 7-hour book and took about 100 MB of space (it's a 32-bit mono, protected AAC file). Thats a lot of audiobooks on one nano!

 

[mrgreen4242]

I'll start by saying that I have never bought an audio book from iTunes... they are way to expensive. You're better off getting a used CD set from eBay or just going to your local library and ripping them.

The format they use is AAC, but I'm not sure on the bitrate. I rip mine at 32kbps (or less) and it sounds fine. The files from iTunes are flagged as bookmarkable, so you can pause them, listen to something else and then com back to the same spot in the book you left off at. Very handy; you can do this to your own ripped audio books as well. You can HUNDREDS of hours of audio book into 4gb. On my 4gb mini I have probably close to 100 hours of audio books and still have room for roughly 500 songs (approx 2000 minutes = 33 hours of music).

There's no end of good good books out there on audio. The Harry Potter books are really good, and the reader (Jim Dale) is incredible. The Lord of the Rings series is great, of coursel I also recommend anything by Douglas Adams (he reads them himself), especially Last Chance to See.

Good luck!