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Archive for the ‘Tutorial’ Category

(Always Backup your Data Files)

Audio books make big files – even when they’re compressed into the MP3 format. An unabridged book can last for between 12 and twenty hours – maybe more.

Typically you’re going to have a number of files which will last an hour or so.

Now I think that’s not very convenient when you want to load them onto your mp3 player.

I prefer to have files of around a maximum 15 minutes or so as this makes navigation much easier. After all, one of the great things about audio books is that you can listen while waiting for the bus, driving down the road and so on.

If the files are too big, it’s not easy to find your place.

If you’re only going to split one or two files you can do it manually using Audacity or MP3 Cut, but if you have a lot of files it’s better if you can automate the process.

The best completely free programme I’ve found for this is Slice Audio File Splitter:

You can download it here.

Slice Audio File Splitter (http://www.nch.com.au/splitter/index.html)

mp3el (http://www.nch.com.au/components/index.html)

Don’t forget to download the mp3el.dll file and copy it into the Slice directory.

If you don’t use this component, everything will seem to go fine, but there’ll be no sound at the end.

Some time ago I downloaded  “The Confessions of Saint Augustine“.

This Audio book has ten files each lasting about one and a quarter hours – It’s really easier to slice these files using a batch process.

Here goes!

First of all, open Slice.

Here’s the screen.

Slice – Screenshot

You need to:

• Add the files you want to split. (I’ve only added one as an example)

• Make an output folder for the split files.

• Decide how to split the files – with an Audio Book you can do this by number or time.

For these files I chose to split into 5 parts which should result in files of about fifteen minutes each.

Slice – Options

Next let’s use the encoder settings to decide on the quality of the output. I prefer to use VBR – Variable Bit Rate – but you may prefer to stick to the standard CBR of about 128 which will provide a good speech recording.

Slice Encoder Settings

When you’ve done all this just press the big Slice button and wait – it may take some time.

Press to Slice

When you’ve finished check your output folder and you should have your Audio Book neatly split into five pieces for each original file – much easier to use on most players.

We’ve concentrated on Audio Books for the moment but I’d like to take a break and in the next few post look at some software issues and some other reading material such as online magazines.

I mentioned In my last post that sometimes when you record from the radio, you often find that there is material at the beginning and at the end you don’t want.

Sometimes it’s part of another program altogether sometimes it’s stuff that you’re not particularly interested in like credits long lists of who the people are and so on.

And if this is the situation, then maybe the best thing is to cut off the beginning and at the end of your recording so that you are left only with what you want

There are quite a lot of ways of doing this but I’m going to suggest doing it directly with a programme called MP3 direct cut, which you can download for free – details of course on the free resources page and in the last blog post – Cutting and Splitting Your Audio Files.

Now a word of warning before you begin:

This is a destructive process – that means you’re actually going to destroy your file while you cut pieces out.

So my advice in these circumstances is always to make a copy of your file so that if anything goes wrong or you want to change things later you have the original file to work on.

This of course is good practice in working with files quite often because even if everything goes more or less well, you might have a power cut or a computer crash.

So the whole question of working on copies on backing up your files is quite an important one well be looking at a later.

Another precaution you can take is to save files under a different name.

I’m going to do it all directly, but I do make the point that it’s best to work on a copy of your original.

If you open up your file in MP3 Direct Cut – in this case the file is the Natural History of Selbourne, which I recorded earlier – you’ll be able to press the Play button and you’ll soon find that it isn’t quite what you want.

You’ll find that in MP3 Direct Cut there are whole range of controls the you can use to help you.

As the very beginning of the file is not what you want the first thing to do is to press the button, called Set Begin.

MP3 Direct Cut – Set Begin

This will instruct the programme where you want to  begin to cut away the first part of the programme don’t want.

You can then continue playing the file or use the drag bar at the top to help you to get to the part of the recording which you actually want to cut away.

MP3 Direct Cut – Drag

That is of course just before the part of the recording that you want begins.

When you find that place, just press the  Stop button

MP3 Direct Cut – Stop

And at that point you can press the Set End button.

MP3 Direct Cut – Set End

You’ll see that the part of the recording that you want to delete is highlighted in light blue and when you’re sure that’s the bit you want to delete press the delete key on your keyboard.

After that, you can go to File, choose Save All, and save your file overwriting the file that you are using.

MP3 Direct Cut – Save All

The programme will warn you twice if you really want to do this and each time you should say yes.

What you’ll now have is a shorter file, a file which begins at the place that you want it to begin.

The next thing you’re going to do is to cut the end of your file away.

This is done really more or less in the same way.

You open the file and you play the recording or you drag the recording until you’re more or less, where you want to be. (You know, the recording should be about 65 minutes long so that gives you a good idea.)

You get to the place where you want the end of your recording to be and again this time you’ll press the Set Begin button which will show you where you want your cut to begin.

Then simply drag your file to the very end and you can press the Set End button.

Once again, the range to cut away will be highlighted.

Press the delete key and to File – Save All and you’ll then have the recording of the natural history of Selbourne, without any irrelevant information at the beginning or the end

OK, so now you’ve downloaded and configured audiograbber, how are we going to actually record our audiobook from the Radio.

Well, there’s an immediate easy way and the scheduled way.

The easy way is to wait until the programme you want to record starts and then hit the Record button on Real Player or Audio Grabber.

Real Player will tell you if recording is permitted.  As I only recommend legal methods of obtaining recordings I’ll concentrate on Radio where recording is allowed.

The scheduled way is more sophisticated. It means you can go out to dinner, go to bed, and when you get back your recording is all ready on your computer in the mp3 format.

Here’s how.

You need to choose your programme.

For the purposes of this tutorial I’ve chosen today’s broadcast of one of my favourite books, Gilbert White’s the “Natural History of Selbourne” on Spoken Word Internet Radio Station. If you’ve forgotten it’s (http://www.audiobookradio.net/index.php).

Go to Programme Schedule and the broadcast is scheduled for 3.39pm / am.

Obviously you can just leave the radio streaming until you’re ready to record but a better way might be to schedule when you want the broadcast to start. If you’ve forgotten how to do this, or haven’t read the Post Tutorial, you can find it here: (Let’s Schedule “The Dead Hand” by Wilkie Collins)

My tip is to set the start time a little earlier than scheduled.

Next, it’s time to open up Audiograbber and set the timer to record the programme when it’s broadcast:

Make sure it’s in Line In Sampling mode and play a sound file to make sure the Mixer is used for recording as discussed last Post – i.e. checking that the record level is working.

AudioGrabber is easy to set up. If your recording is on the same day, just write the day in where it says date. For time use the same system as your computer clock – in my case 17:35:00 and the length is in hours and minutes.

If you get stuck, Audiograbber has excellent help files.

Now you’re ready to go away and leave your computer to make the recording.

You can ask Audiograbber to shut down the computer when it’s finished.

This doesn’t always seem to work for me so we’ll check some other shut down programmes in another post.

For the moment you might like to download these two programmes for the final clean up.

MP3 Cut

and

Vista Shutdown Timer

Details on the Free Resources Page.

Ok so you’ve grabbed Audiograbber and you’ve downloaded the LAME files – especially the dll. So it’s time to set things up.

Open Audiograbber and you’ll get a screen like this:

Before we can use it, we have to decide on a few options using the Settings tab.

First of all, in General Settings decide where to save the new recordings? You can choose any directory you like but I like to have a directory only for my recordings.

The next step is to make sure we can record directly to the mp3 format.

Because MP3 files are so widespread many people assume that it’s a free standard. It isn’t, so we must find a free decoder. The standard is LAME. The name in fact means LAME Ain’t an Mp3 Encoder!

Anyway, you must download LAME and make sure the relevant files are loaded into the same directory as your Audiograbber installation. Here’s how it is on my computer.

The next stage is to set your MP3 settings:

There are lots of views on this but I prefer high quality rather than the smallest file so I use variable bitrate settings. Here’s how my settings look.

Now we’re almost ready to make our first recording.

choose line in sampling from the File menu.

You should get this without the green volume bar.

Check the volume meter. No volume, no recording. It’s as simple as that.

Here’s where things get a little bit tricky because operating systems and setups vary a bit.

Play something on your computer, music, voice, anything.

If the volume meter shows up and gets shorter and longer, you’re in luck.

If not, you must make sure that your recording system is set to mixer, not line in or microphone.

Try clicking the mixer button – you might be in luck.

If you’re like me you’ll have to go to the audio manager. My computer uses the popular Realtek manager and it’s in the Control Panel reached through the start menu.

When you’re in the control panel, find the sound effect icon

Then make sure the stereo mix control is highlighted.

Now everything is ready for recording.

Audiograbber will, indeed, grab any sound on the computer and you can see that you can record manually just by setting the time in minutes and pressing the record button or you can choose time scheduled.

Next post we’ll make the actual recording.

Footnote:

Audiograbber is a Windows only programme. Users of other operating systems my like to try Audacity the current, stable version doesn’t include a timer facility but the new Beta version does. I’ll look at it closer later.

I got this information from this post at RichardCravey.com thanks

Of course it’s great to be able to listen to scheduled radio programmes and not forget the time and most broadcasters repeat the programme several times .

But nevertheless, the fact is that quite often the programme will be scheduled at an inconvenient time.

Maybe you’re away, maybe it’s late at night something like that. Or maybe you are just too busy.

So what can you do then?

Well, if you look at certain broadcasters – the BBC is a good example – you’ll find a listen again possibility.

On almost all the radio programmes broadcast by the BBC there is the opportunity to listen again.

That is, the programme is kept for seven days and you can listen to it any time you like, over the seven days.

There are all sorts of copyright reasons for not keeping it longer and I’ll be coming some of those later.

But nevertheless, it means that within any period of seven days, you can listen to a lot of programmes when you want, and there is even one BBC service, which is entirely devoted to listening on demand like this and, unsurprisingly, it’s called Listen Again.

Here’s the address.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/

Now, you can see the possibility let’s go to the BBC Listen Again and you’ll see that you can choose any time within the last seven days and then you’ll be given a programme schedule.

And these programs you can listen to whenever you want.

So let’s take as an example an episode of the Pallisers.

the famous novel novel by Anthony Trollope.

Now, you can listen to this episode whenever you like, you can simply click onto the icon to listen and you can do this at your convenience.

On the other hand, you could also schedule it in just the same way as we did for the streaming radio.

For this is simply go to the icon, click on the right button of your mouse, and choose “Save Link As”.

You can save this file to your desktop

and then any time that you like, over the next seven days, you can just click on that icon to listen to the programme or you can schedule it to play at a time that convenient for you, just to make sure that you don’t forget.

This listen on demand service from the BBC gives you more flexibility when it comes to listening again to your favourite programmes.

Unless you’re planning to have the radio streaming all day long you’ll probably want to have it on and off at various times when the programs you want are being played.

One of the problems I find is that if I just leave it to my memory, I often forget, and then I’m disappointed because I’ve missed my programme.

You might also want to use your computer as some sort of alarm system.

There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to schedule the radio stream.

So for this post I’m going to continue to look at how we can schedule the radio programme to play the Dead Hand by Wilkie Collins. And for this purpose I’m going to use the Solway Task Scheduler.

So the most important thing is once you’ve downloaded it and installed it to click it on.

On my computer I’ll find the task schedule icon like a clock in my task tray.

So we need to open that up and then we’ll find the open image of Solway’s Task Scheduler which should say no tasks have yet been created.

So first of all, we must create a task.

To do this we’ll go down to the bottom of the task schedule picture and click on the plus button which will say add a new task.

It should be a simple matter to add the details into the define new task.

The task name in this case I’ve called The Dead Hand to remind me what the story is and the file to open is the icon that I made on my desktop for Audio Book Radio. And then I put in the scheduled period in this case once only because I only want to listen to this once today. The start date, which is the day that the programme is played and local time, which in my case is 14.10. And to finish this part of the procedure, after clicking off, just for Thursday, I am going to click on the save button.

Once everything is saved I can check the screen again and see that we are ready to play the programme on schedule.

And here we can see that it says The Dead Hand, the frequency – once only, The time, and everything is now ready and this means that at 4.10 today I will be able to listen to The Dead Hand while I’m doing my work or just relaxing

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

So, let’s get straight in and talk about our next free book. The important think now is to look at free books in the PDF format. Many, many e books are produced like this.

E books are electronic books and the PDF format is ideal.

It’s ideal for many reasons some of which are perhaps not ideal from the readers point of view.

One reason why many Electronic Books are produced in the PDF format is because the author can block the use of a great deal of the content. It can be password protected so that the reader cannot copy the book and cannot print the book. I tend to take the view that too much of this is against the principles of our project here at Free Books Plus.

Another thing I want to emphasise again is the Free Books Plus is only concerned with legal books. I say that because you’ll find many many books on the Internet which are often free as illegal downloads using file sharing schemes and also from sites and parts of the world where copyright is not respected or recognized.

If you download these books you do so at your own risk and also run the risk of download the nasties that pervade the Internet such as viruses and trojans.

As this is our first PDF book, I want to make sure that everything is simple and convenient, so I’m going to give you one of my own stories.

As I’ve mentioned, perhaps, I’ve had a number of careers in my life as a photographer, a writer and an educator. Now my writing career has been somewhat sporadic and I’ve often concentrated more on journalism than literature.

Nevertheless I have published a handful of short stories and poems so I’m going to give you as my first free PDF book the first story I ever published and got paid for.

Karl comes out of my experiences working as an auxiliary psychiatric nurse near Edinburgh. I’ll say straight away as most authors do that it’s a work of fiction. The name Karl I took from a man I greatly admired but had nothing to do with the mental health regime of the time.

So, I think it’s a good idea to provide my first free PDF book as one which I know has no restrictions and which you can copy and print as you like – though not use for any commercial purpose.

You can download it, read it on the screen, print it out or share with your friends as you like.

So here are the procedures for dealing with the story called Karl.

The first thing you have to do is download it. (Always make sure you virus check files downloaded from the Internet)

So click here:

Although PDF files are compact you’ll normally find them provided as Zip files.

I’m hoping that most readers will know what a Zip file is but if you don’t it’s just a file or collection of files which are packaged together and compressed or zipped to make them smaller.

When you’ve downloaded the Zip file you’ll have to unzip it.

If you use Microsoft XP as your operating system you’ll find it easy because it has a built in zip extractor – you simply right click on the file and choose extract all.

If you need a programme to unzip your files there are many available. Many are commercial products but I suggest using 7 – Zip which is a free Open Source product.

Once you’ve downloaded your zip file and unzipped, you’ll then have to read it – and I’ve already given details of some PDF programmes to do the job.

Once you’ve opened your PDF file you can read the story on screen, print it out or send copies to your friends.

I hope you’ll enjoy this free book, I hope you’ll enjoy reading one of my stories.

I’m going to ask some other writers if they have free books available too.

I’m going to sign off now, – it’s a bit boring but I’ll suggest again if you’ve got a moment, subscribe to the feed, comment for everyone to read your views, and bookmark me on your favourite Social Sites.

Till next time …