Posts Tagged ‘free audio books’
I hadn’t meant to write this post quite this way – but flexibility is important. One point of blogging is to respond to how things change.
Anyway, I had prepared a list of commercial companies offering free books, both print and audio and was planning to talk about them at a convenient time.
the reason I’m going to start with Christian audio at
http://christianaudio.com/
is because there’s a time sensitive element.
Now I know that lots of readers aren’t Christian but I have found that many faith based sites have plenty of material of interest to readers of different persuasions.
Some authors like C S Lewis of “Narnia” fame have a subtle Christian viewpoint.
Others like Fyodor Dostoevsky deal with the great issues of life and death and morality in novels like “Crime and Punishment”.
This means that we might find suitable reading material irrespective of our beliefs.
Just as a matter of interest when I lived in Oman one of my closest friends there kept a good selection of Arabic and Islamic classics in his car which he played on the long distance drive from Muscat the capital of Oman to his village near Ibra on the edge of the Wahabi Sands – it’s not just a Western thing.
So, let’s get back to Christian Audio. There’s a time sensitive element in that it’s still August.
Christian audio offer a free full length audio book download every month.
As I’ve just found this site I don’t know what the offerings are usually like but this month it’s an audio version of a book that I have enjoyed reading: – as the publisher says:
“The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Unabridged) by Augustine of Hippo”
The Confessions is at once the autobiographical account of Augustine’s life of Christian faith and at the same time a compelling theology of Christian spirituality for everyone.
You can download this entirely free (the usual price is $26.98)
I think it’s a bargain. The audio book is provided for download in ten parts.
There’s a small inconvenience in that you have to register with Christan Audio but this costs you nothing and you can then check every month to see if the free book offer interests you.
A specially good point is that this recording is not encumbered by DRM (Digital Rights Management).
I’m enjoying this book and would love to get your feedback.
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.
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
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/
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So to free audio books.
some people love them and some people loathe them.
I’m going to tell you that right now that I come into the first group.
I love audio books.
Why some people loathe them I’m not quite sure. Perhaps it’s because they don’t like the way they’re read and some people don’t like the abridged versions.
Another problem with commercial audio books is that they’re often very expensive.
However, from my point of view audio books do a great job in certain circumstances, for example on long journeys or when you have a lot of time on your hands, waiting in airports and so on.
For me the most obvious example was last year when I was 10 days in hospital.
Exactly what was wrong with me I’m not absolutely certain. My doctor had ordered some blood tests, I was coughing very badly and she decided to send me to hospital.
Now in common with most countries, here in Bulgaria hospitals have trouble with funding but I can put it on the record that I was quite impressed.
it wasn’t that the food was good, it wasn’t that the ward was bright and newly painted.
It was that the medical staff and the equipment they used were excellent.
The great danger of course was getting bored. My wife and son visited me every day but nevertheless I had hours and hours to spare.
But time passed rather happily as I had with me the complete recordings of the “Diaries of Samuel Pepys” and the “Diary of Adrian Mole”, one factual and one fictional diary which made up a diary phase and I was really able to listen to these works. And lying there on my hospital bed and, later on, when I was allowed to get up and walk around, sitting in my chair, with my mp3 player, it really made my day. So I can only say “Great” to audio books.
So, what about free audio books?
I’ve been astonished in my researches at the enormous variety of resources for free audio books. And, in coming posts I’ll be looking at some of those resources and I’ll be giving tutorials on how I deal with them.
This site is about legal free books.
When it gets to audio books there are copyright issues not only surrounding th text but also the actors, producers and so on.
There are several sources of audio books which are free.
One of the most obvious is the radio.
As this blog is on a computer I’m going to emphasize playing and listening to the radio over the internet.
Exactly what to listen to, and how to listen to it is something for next time.
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