Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
As I said, last post was a bit of a diversion but if you’ve downloaded “The Confessions of Saint Augustine” you’ll have found that even though it’s been split into ten files, each file is over an hour long.
You might want to split each file into smaller segments so that you can find each part more easily on your audio player.
A short while ago I suggested recording from the radio.
If you do this, you’ll probably get files which are not only rather long – Gilbert White’s the “Natural History of Selbourne”is over an hour for example but,
You’ll also probably have bits at the beginning and end of your recording which you don’t want.
You might like to cut off the unwanted portions of the recording – top and tail so to speak.
Soon, I’ll go through how to cut and split recordings step by step but for now, let’s go and get the free software to do the job.
You’ll need:
mp3 Direct Cut (http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html)
and
Slice Audio File Splitter (http://www.nch.com.au/splitter/index.html)
together with a component part
mp3el (http://www.nch.com.au/components/index.html)
(This is vital as without it, you’ll get no sound.
Details also on the Free Resources Page.
Next time, we’ll look at cutting and splitting in detail.
My son loves to listen to the radio.
He has a radio cassette recorder in his room and when he wants to record something that he hears, he simply presses the button and the recording is made on the tape cassette.
In my living room I have a rather more sophisticated DVD hard disc recorder so that I can record television shows for the purpose of timeshifting. That is, so I can watch a film which is shown at two o’clock in the morning at a time convenient for me.
So it all seems very easy.
Unfortunately, when it comes to recording from the Internet, the situation is not so simple.
The broadcasters and producers of music and speech and the consumers have managed to get themselves into a great big mess.
Producers and consumers have simply not managed to come to an agreement concerning copying digital material which they both accept as fair and legal.
Now when it comes to copying from the internet so that we can listen at our own convenience, the situation is quite complicated.
There are two main considerations:
One is the technical one.
How do we actually record from the Internet Radio?
There are many software programs available, which you can buy and some of them even have names like BBC radio recorder.
Now, I’m going to tell you again that this site, Free Books Plus is based on legal and legitimate free audio and print books, so I don’t want to get into any grey areas.
My proposal is to first of all discuss the technical means of copying from the Internet Radio using free software and then secondly, to have a look at how we can copy from an Internet radio station, when it legal.
If you play a radio station in RealPlayer and the record button is active, it means that this radio station has not tried to block the recording system.
Now, in order to make your recordings from the Internet Radio, I’m going to advise downloading two pieces of free software.
The first one is a program called audiograbber.
In order to make audiograbber work correctly to produce the MP3 files that you probably want, you will then have to download another piece of software called LAME.
Here are the internet addresses which are also available on the resources page.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Audiograbber.htm
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Lame_Encoder.htm
In the next post there’ll be more advice on how to use these pieces of software, and eventually how to make your recordings.
Blogging is a human activity, and so there are bound to be delays.
Even so I never expected a combination of tooth infection with so many visits to the dentist, land clearing, which I had planned and, shame of it, actually deleting one of my blogs by accident which caused me so many delays.
It’s not something you really think much about when you start blogging. So it’s live and learn.
Anyway, without going on about this too much, lets get on with the next part of the post to see how we can listen to free books on the radio and then schedule our listening to give us more control.
And for this part I’m going to leave the BBC and have a look at a relatively new service called Audio Book Radio.
This service, plays books and stories and also provides an opportunity to buy commercial recordings.
Obviously the emphasis in Free Books Plus will be on listening to the free radio broadcasts
The first thing we have to do is to find the station, which broadcasts from this address.
http://www.audiobookradio.net/index.php
Here you’ll find information and a programme guide.
Let’s have a look at how to play this radio station and then later on, perhaps to scheduling it to play when we want it to.
Audio Book Radio gives you a choice of many different players.
You probably know by now that the question of media players is really quite a controversial one.
Many of the well-known players have a number of problems and are controlled by commercial interests.
I’m not going to go into that here.
I’m going to stay with Real Player simply because it’s the player we’ve been using before
The first thing to do is to right click your mouse on to Real Player and then choose Save Link As.
I’m using the Firefox browser. Your browser may be slightly different.
To make things easier, I’m going to change the link name to something like audiobook radio, and then save the the link to the desktop.
If we do this, it means that any time we click on this link Real Player will open up and play the radio programme of Audiobook Radio.
If you look at the Programme Scedule you’ll see the times the stories are broadcast – which you will have to adjust to your local time of course.
For my purposes I’ve chosen the story The Dead Hand by Wilkie Collins.
In the next post we’ll look at how to schedule Audio Book radio to start playing on our computer at the correct time.
There are many schedulers available but I’m going to illustrate the use of the free programme Solway’s Task Scheduler – details on the resources page
So, make sure you’ve got your scheduler ready
Until next time ….
Using the Internet as a radio can be quite a simple experience.
There are a few different approaches towards this using it in exactly the old way when we switched on the radio and listened to the radio, as it came live or streaming as it’s sometimes called.
In my last post, I suggested downloading one or two resources. In this post, I’d like to consider using the free programme, Viddi Player.
So here’s an example of how to listen to BBC Radio 4 using Viddi player.
Simply start the player and choose BBC Radio 4 from the drop down menu on the right.
If you like, you can always add this to your favourites, and every time that you start the player from now on, It will start with BBC Radio 4 until you change your station.
You might prefer to listen directly from the BBC Radio 4 site.
You can find it in many different ways of course, but as we’re using the the player, we can click on the I or information button, and there we’ll able to get more details about the web page of the station playing.
Click on the web page information to open up the BBC Radio 4 page now and find the listen live button.
We could just click on this now if we want to listen to the programme but if we do, when we close the page we’ll have to do it all again later.
So let’s see how we can provide a link on our computer desktop, which will always play Radio 4 whenever we like.
First of all we need to click on the listen live icon.
This will take us to a pop up box, which has the text, “Listen using stand-alone player” and if we right click on this box we can choose “save link”.
So let’s choose the save link, and when we come to save, I suggest saving it to the desktop, but changing the name.
In this case I’ve chosen the name Radio4player and chosen to save it to the desktop.
Once we’ve done this, we should the return to the desktop where we now have an icon with the RealPlayer logo saying, ” Radio4player”
and any time we want to listen to BBC Radio 4 we can click on this icon, and the BBC Radio 4 programme will start.
There’s one thing more to think about and that is of course using the radio through the Internet depends very much on how good your Internet connection is.
Later we’ll want to see how we can control what we listen to, how and when.
Before you can listen to the radio you need to have a number of resources, and that’s what I intend to begin on today.
BBC radio like a number of other radio stations transmits in a format which is called Real Audio. Some people like this format, and some people don’t, but we need to understand it. And this means that first of all, you must have a media player that is capable of playing Real Audio files.
Real Audio files normally have extensions which end in .ra. or .ram.
The media player recommended by the BBC and the one that I’m going to concentrate on is known as Real Player.
Real Player is what is sometimes known as a freemium product. That is, it comes in two versions – a free version and a premium paid for version.
As free audio books are concerned, we’re only interested in the free version.
Many people don’t much like Real Player they have all sorts of problems with it. However, I think that the latest version, which is number 11 at this time has more or less got rid of the problems.
The only thing is that you need to be very careful when you download and install it.
First of all, make sure that you’re downloading the free version.
Real media is a commercial organisation, and they will invite to to take a trial of their premium version. My advice for listening to the radio is, don’t.
Secondly, when you install Real Player, don’t simply click the buttons automatically. Read all the information carefully. You may be invited to subscribe to newsletters from companies recommended by Real Player. I suggest that you don’t.
At some point you may be asked to give an e-mail. There’s nothing wrong with this and I have never had problems from any spam from Real Player, but nevertheless this is a very good example of where to use a free disposable e-mail address such that Gishpuppy or Kasmail. You can subscribe directly to Gishpuppy on this site.
The third thing to be clear about is that at some point you will be invited to make Real Player your universal media player.
This is a real problem. You may have no media player, at all, you may have several different media players on your computer, but my advice is to agree only to have Real Player as your media player for Real Audio files – that is files ending with .ra or .ram.
If you do this, I don’t think you’ll have any problems with Real Player.
If for one reason or other you are adventurous, or you don’t like Real Player, you may do what many other people do, which is to try the Real Player Alternative, which is a much smaller download, or you could even try the Videolan player, which is a universal player which will play almost anything.
However for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to concentrate on how to use Real Player, as the media player for real audio files.
Download details are on the resources page
Once you’ve downloaded and installed Real Player you can listen to the BBC online and many other radio station.
To make this easier and give you more control I’d suggest also download these two free programmes:
viddiradioplayer
and
Solway’s Task Scheduler
Details are available on the resources page
In many cases, though not all, this is likely to involve logging onto or listening to a programme from the BBC.
The BBC like many other radio organizations has got two kinds of broadcast. Though nowadays with podcasts you might say there are three.
The first kind is what is often called streaming radio.
This simply means just as in the old days, you turn the radio on and the programme comes according to the schedule of the station. If you want to listen to that live, you have to be there and available when the programme is played which is not always convenient.
The second kind of broadcast is known as radio on demand.
The BBC and other stations have sites where the programmes are stored for, perhaps, let’s say seven days. And then, you can listen to them whenever you wish to.
A new technology is podcasting, which is a slightly different sort of thing, and we’ll look at it later.
We’ll think about all these things but I’m going to begin by looking at a few of the sites where you can find free audio book material.
Just before continuing with that, it’s worth saying that sometimes the books are read simply as texts. Sometimes, quite often, they are dramatised, and quite often, of course, they are recordings of dramatic works.
For example, in the last few weeks, I’ve listened to a complete recording of “A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, by Tennessee Williams, I’ve listened to an adaptation of “Don Quixote” by Cervantes, This of course is all with radio recordings.
There are other companies and organizations which are in the business of providing free audio book recordings which you can download and I’ll be coming to them later.
Sometimes they are commercial organizations which like to give out some freebies. But more often they’re organizations which exist to publish various types of audio book material.
So that’s something to think about.
And for our next post we’ll have a look at what we need to listen to free books on the internet radio.
If you’re already set up for listening on line these are some of my favourite sites to check:
Drama on Three: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/
The Classic Serial: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/classic_serial.shtml
The Friday Play: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/friday_play.shtml
The Saturday Play: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/saturday_play.shtml
The Afternoon Play: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml
Listen Again: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/
If you have time, please give your thoughts as comments and perhaps bookmark me with your favourite social sites
In my last post we had a look at how to deal with text files, probably the most basic types of files, with the story “Tobermory” downloaded from the Gutenberg site.
At the end I referred to the PDF file and many, many ebooks or electronic books created sometimes for commercial purposes or informational purposes are provided as PDF files.
PDF simply means Portable Document Format and it was created by the company Adobe – most famous for the Photoshop programme.
The resulting files are small and can combine text and graphics in a convenient format.
Many sites will tell you to read them using the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
First of all I want to be quite clear that this site Freebooks Plus is about promoting free online books, free off line books and free audio books. It’s not about attacking commercial companies.
Many commercial companies such as Adobe provide free resources of excellent quality.
My difficulty with the Adobe Acrobat reader is that it’s a very large download, it gets updated frequently with even more features that are not always useful for our purposes and there’s some danger of it taking over your browser and your PDF files unless your careful with it.
But by all means if you want to get a completely free and totally reliable PDF reader, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is perfectly good.
However readers of Freebooks Plus might like to consider other options.
You might like to support the Open Source Software movement, or perhaps just want to have much smaller downloads which use fewer resources.
So, if you go to my resource page you can see a list of several alternative PDF readers.
One of the most important points from where I am is if there is a portable version. By portable here I mean, a version of the software that can be carried around on a pen drive often called a memory stick or a USB flash drive.
The reason for this is that if you travel a lot you can take most of your software with you. You can plug into the USB port of any computer in the world and you can quickly use you programmes without leaving any files or information on the host computer.
Pen drives and alternatives such as flash memory cards are getting larger in capacity but it still makes sense to have the smallest programmes available, both to download and to store.
I suggest going to the resources page and trying out the different PDF readers to see which one suits you best.
One more point perhaps is that all these readers do a good job of reading PDF files but not all give you any option for writing onto PDF files.
This is not strictly necessary for reading freebooks but it might be a factor for you.
From the portability point of view I favour the Sumatra and Foxit readers as they are small and seem stable.
The Sumatra Reader is an Open Source product which means that it isn’t a cut down version of a commercial product and it should work across several operating systems.
So let’s choose a PDF reader and then get ready to obtain, prepare and print a free book in the PDF format.
One final point, this blog is all about legal free books.
I can’t stress that enough.
Some PDF book creators may have decided to block facilities such as copying the contents or printing it.
I suggest we respect the authors rights and concentrate on freebooks that don’t have too many restrictions.
If you found this post interesting please don’t be shy about leaving your comments.
I want to share information on freebooks with as many people as possible.
And
If you’ve got a minute, please bookmark me onto your favourites site using the Icons below.
Until next time….
In my last post I blithely wrote about printing out your story. And that simply indicates that there are two or three ways of dealing with your story.
You can:
- Read it on the screen
- Print it out on paper
- Read it on a special electronic reader
Reading on the computer screen can be tiring and of course you are then tied to a screen even if your computer is portable. Electronic readers are still very much at the initial stages of development – one the latest being the Amazon Kindle.
So for the moment, the traditional option is to print your text though this will cost you in terms of money, paper and printing resources and time.
One problem is, which type of printer? Now you’ve probably got a printer so you’ll use it anyway. However, if you haven’t got a printer or you’d like to think a bit more about it there are a few options.
Here’s a few thoughts on typical printing technologies available given in the order of their development so to speak.
Dot Matrix Printers
You’re likely to see these around in shops and business rather than offices and there’s a good reason for this:
They’re the only type that can produce a copy at the same time as printing the orginal so are useful for billing and so on.
They work much like an old fashioned typewriter in that they have a head with metal pins that move across the page and physically strike a ribbon.
Now this may sound pretty old fashioned but they’re still in widespread use so you can get ribbon supplies and the fanfold paper – paper folded up in a concertina fashion – that they typically use. You’ll have more luck in an office supplies shop than a computer store.
Are they any good?
- Well they’re quite good at printing text and they’re pretty cheap to run. Not much good for graphics or colour.
- The cheapest dot matrix printers have 9 pins and more sophisticated models have 24 which makes for good printed output with a fresh ribbon.
- You can set them up and leave them to print. The main problem is that they are noisy and of course not much good for printing anything but text.
Next in line are:
Ink jet printers
These are very popular these days and it’s easy to see why. Inkjet printers are usually pretty cheap to buy and can produce a very high quality output. they’re specially good at printing colour and good quality colour photographs.
However, from the point of view of printing out large amounts of text they do have certain disadvantages.
- If they’re not used frequently you can find that the print heads dry up and you have a lot of trouble unclogging them and getting them to work again.
- Another problem is that if you print a lot of text with an inkjet printer replacing the cartridges can be very expensive and quite soon the cost of printing is quite soon more than the cost of the printer.
There’s been quite a lot of discussion about this and even the European Commission has got involved.
You can try using cartridges from independent manufactures, recycled cartridges and even try refilling the cartridges yourself but these techniques all have their downside. The printer manufacturers don’t like this.
A third kind of printer is the
Laser Printer
Laser printers are traditionally quite expensive to buy but they tend to be cheaper to run. Some of them are mono only printers, that is they will print only in black and white.
Some will print colour which is suitable for coloured documents but tends not to be photo quality.
Laser printers also have certain disadvantages.
- They make a certain amount of noise – though no more than the inkjet printers.
- There are some concerns about health and safety because they use similar technology to photocopiers and use some rather unpleasant chemicals to produce their results.
However, from the point of printing out text, they will print out the best quality at the lowest cost if you choose carefully and check the cost of printing – some printers are cheaper to buy but more expensive to run than others.
Also check how easy it is to replace the toners and drums when you need to.
So, purely from the point of view of printing out texts I’d probably think first of dot matrix printers and laser printers and look on ink jets only for occasional use.
I think if you have a choice, it’s worth looking at the technologies available.
A word of warning – technology is always changing. I’m only talking about printing standard text not graphics, photos, or PDF documents.
And
Please understand that I’m only giving my opinion and that you are entirely responsible for your choice and use of printers.
Next time I think we’ll have a look at free books prepared in PDF – or Portable Document Format. This is an open standard independent format created by Adobe Systems in 1993
