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dmarleySpent the weekend at my mother's, doing iPod maintenance and continuing iPod education. My mom, as I may have mentioned, has two iPods in order to keep up with her audiobook habit. While we were on vacation, iPod number one--which had already shown signs of wear and tear--began to really screw up. I brought it home, downloaded the files from it (confirming, by the way, that it was Seriously Screwed Up), and put them all on a new iPod. So far, so good.
While I was in there, and had the files on my hard drive, I decided to look into converting some of her digitized-from-cassette-tape files. The software she was using to capture the audio was called EZ-Something, which not surprisingly didn't have a lot of options. Among the missing options was one to save in any format other than WAV. I knew the WAV files would be gigantic, and I'd always meant to get around to showing her how to convert them to MP3 in iTunes, but it wasn't until I dug into the WAV files she had that I realized how bad it was.
If you've never confronted the hugeness of the WAV format, here's one example:
45-minute audio book file, saved as a WAV: 458MB
Same file, converted to a 56kps MP3: 16MB
After converting her tape files, I saved my mom a total of 100GB of space over both her iPods. Since you can usually get an entire audiobook in a little less than 1GB, that's 100 more books she can cram on. :) We got her backed up and sorted out this weekend, so she's got some room for her backlog.
I lugged home her USB tape deck so I can convert a couple of boxes of her books on tape for her. She'd kind of given up doing it because of the huge files and the tedious process of making them. You have to physically play each tape in order to record the sound on the computer, then you have to export the file as an MP3, which takes Audacity about an hour and a half for a 45-minute file. The math? A 10-hour book takes 30 hours to convert. There's also no way to automatically shut off the recording software once the tape stops playing, so you have to be around to stop the recording (or have a big hard drive :)).
This is my mom's birthday present, by the way. She's just lucky Elizabeth Peters didn't put out a new book this year. :)
While I was in there, and had the files on my hard drive, I decided to look into converting some of her digitized-from-cassette-tape files. The software she was using to capture the audio was called EZ-Something, which not surprisingly didn't have a lot of options. Among the missing options was one to save in any format other than WAV. I knew the WAV files would be gigantic, and I'd always meant to get around to showing her how to convert them to MP3 in iTunes, but it wasn't until I dug into the WAV files she had that I realized how bad it was.
If you've never confronted the hugeness of the WAV format, here's one example:
45-minute audio book file, saved as a WAV: 458MB
Same file, converted to a 56kps MP3: 16MB
After converting her tape files, I saved my mom a total of 100GB of space over both her iPods. Since you can usually get an entire audiobook in a little less than 1GB, that's 100 more books she can cram on. :) We got her backed up and sorted out this weekend, so she's got some room for her backlog.
I lugged home her USB tape deck so I can convert a couple of boxes of her books on tape for her. She'd kind of given up doing it because of the huge files and the tedious process of making them. You have to physically play each tape in order to record the sound on the computer, then you have to export the file as an MP3, which takes Audacity about an hour and a half for a 45-minute file. The math? A 10-hour book takes 30 hours to convert. There's also no way to automatically shut off the recording software once the tape stops playing, so you have to be around to stop the recording (or have a big hard drive :)).
This is my mom's birthday present, by the way. She's just lucky Elizabeth Peters didn't put out a new book this year. :)