All hail The King

Rex is Latin for "King".  Specifically the kings of ancient Rome.

AudioFile magazine is probably the undisputed king of print and web magazines about audiobooks.

Does it deserve the title of "King"? I'll let you be the judge.

If you are like me, you always want to maximize your audiobook budget so that means going to the library site and reserving and waiting (and waiting) for the recent top sellers, looking for sales and free sites (and getting some good deals from time to time, but not always the latest and greatest) and other tricks like renting books from Cracker Barrel.

No matter what you do to get more for your money, it pays to do your homework.  This site is another great tool, especially because you can use it during down time on the train or bus, waiting in line, or wherever.

Let me know what you think in the comments and happy listening!

Rip off

Audiobook CDs are plentiful and a good way for the audiobook addict to get their fix.  This is a tutorial on using fre:ac to "rip" audiobook CDs.

"Ripping" is defined by Merriam-Webster as a chiefly British term meaning excellent or delightful. "I say old chap, we had a ripping good time at the pub last night."

In the world of the Audiobook Addict, we have a very different meaning for the term.

From Wikipedia: "Ripping is the process of copying audio or video content to a hard disk, typically from removable media. The word is used to refer to all forms of media. Despite the name, neither the media nor the data in it is damaged after extraction."

That's good to know!  I would not relish the idea of opening my CD-ROM drive to find silvery slivers.  It is also good news for the audiobook addict because there are many excellent sources of audiobooks on CD.  The obvious ones are the big players in the book selling business like Borders and Barnes and Noble, and for online sales, Amazon (this link will take you to Amazon's best sellers).  Personally, I like Half Price Books.  If you are lucky enough to have one near you, you can buy new and used books at excellent prices, and sell your old ones.  They have a pretty good selection of books on CD at the store near me, so I went down and purchased one for the tutorial.

I know that most of the media manager programs like iTunes and Windows Media Player can rip audio CDs, but they are geared toward ripping music and cataloging it into a collection. They can be difficult to setup properly and tend to make transferring the converted files to the player tricky.  This is the reason I've been recommending the oddly named fre:ac software for ripping audiobooks.  Once the book is properly ripped, you can transfer the files to your player by any method you choose.

fre:ac

From the site: http://www.freac.org/

"fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper which integrates various popular formats and encoders. It currently supports MP3, MP4/M4A, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and Bonk files."

Downloading and installing fre:ac is a fairly simple and straightforward process.  On the right side of the main page, you will see a Download Now button that takes you to a cnet download page where you can download the latest version of the software.  I am sending you there instead of linking to the download directly because below that download button, you will see some donation buttons.  You may want to go back and donate something to the people who volunteer their time and skill to create good free software.  Unlike some other "free" software, fre:ac will not install any toolbars, spyware or other annoyances on your computer.

Now that we have fre:ac installed and running, we can make a few changes to the settings so we get the ripping good rips that we want.

You can go to the Options menu and select General Settings, or just click on the button with the crossed wrench and screwdriver. The general settings window looks like this:

As you can see, I've left the Encoder set to LAME (despite the name it is a good MP3 encoder).  We are going to stick with MP3 because it is supported by virtually all portable media players, and lots of other devices too, like the CD players in many cars.

I have set the Output directory to the folder I've created to store my Audiobooks. This folder is not scanned by iTunes or Windows Media Player and that's the way I want it.  I find it annoying to have those manager programs mix my audiobooks in with my music collection, and it is fairly easy to keep audiobooks organized by folder.

I have also used the pull down menu to select <filename> as the placeholder for Filename pattern.  This means I can simply name the files as I wish.  The other patterns work great for music CDs because it allows the tracks to be automatically named from the music databases on the Internet, but audiobook CDs are often not found in those databases and the naming scheme we are using is much simpler.

Finally, I've checked the box in Options "Encode to single file".  Audiobook CDs often contain dozens of tracks, and to keep this process simple we are only going to create one MP3 file, or "track" for each CD in the book.  Many portable media players, especially the more well known brands offer manual bookmarking, auto-resume or best of all, per track auto-resume (a form of automatic bookmarking). So keeping our place in a file over an hour long really isn't a problem.   Older CD players would simply start at track one when you had turned them off and restarted them later so the publishers would put many tracks on the disk so you could note the track you were on to resume listening later.

Now let's click on the Configure Encoder button and change the way the MP3 files are created:

Since most of these applications are generally used for ripping Music CDs, the default settings are usually overkill for the task of converting recorded speech into compressed files.  We can set our ripping program to use much higher compression (fewer bits per second of audio) and still get very good sounding audiobooks.  This is a good thing because audiobooks can be many hours long and would quickly fill our disk drives and players.  

First, we need to change Presets to "Custom Settings".

Set the VBR mode to "CBR (no VBR)" this will eliminate any potential issues with seeking (FF and RW) on the player.

I recommend setting Bitrate to 64 kbps.  This will give good sound quality and very reasonably sized files.

Now click on the Misc tab:

Change Stereo mode to "Mono".  This can help improve the quality of the sound in some cases and helps if you like to listen in one ear, since some books with multiple readers "pan" the voices toward the left or right for effect.  If you want to retain the left/right separation on this type of audiobook, use the Joint Stereo setting.

We will leave Expert and Audio processing alone for now. (if you are an "expert" feel free to mess around with that tab)  

Now click OK to close the Encoder settings and OK again to close the General settings.

I know that was a pain, but for most of us, it's a one time deal.

So now we are back at the main window, are you ready to rip?

Great, we will insert the first disk of our Audiobook and see what happens.  I selected "Whiskey Sour", (a jack daniels mystrey) by J. A. Konrath.  I'm guessing it's a somewhat humorous detective novel, hopefully something in a Tim Dorsey vein.  I'll let you all know how it goes after I give it a listen.  So once I've inserted the disk, fre:ac checks the CDDB database and woah! it actually found all the information about the book!  I am pleasantly surprised to see this:

Great!  Thanks to whoever entered that data into the CDDB database!  Just make sure the Artist and Album name remain consistent.  In my example book, I noticed that the third disk had "Whiskey Sour Disk 3" as the album title.  Easy to fix by just deleting the Disk 3 from the title.  Had I missed that, I might have seen two or more "Books" in my player.

Now, if there was no information in the database for this book and I had only seen Track 01, Track 02, and so on, it would not have been a big concern. All I need to do at that point is to enter the Artist, Album and Genre information into the blocks provided.  For Genre, use Audiobook or Audio Book, Sansa Players and some other players will recognize either and show these files in the Audiobook section.  As you enter this information, notice that a small down arrow appears at the top right of each box, for Album, Artist and Genre, use this menu to change the setting to "Use for all selected tracks"  

Once you have your tags in place, press the "Play" button in the toolbar or select "Start Encoding" from the Encode menu and off you go!  You will get a file Save As window like this:

Name each file: Notice that I created a folder for the book and simplified the name of the file to "01 - Whiskey Sour.mp3"  Leading zeros can help some players sort the tracks properly.

So I click Save and let fre:ac do it's thing.  Depending on the speed of your computer and drive, you may have time for a tasty beverage or a four course meal.

Now like it says on the back of the shampoo, "Lather, Rinse, Repeat" until you are out of disks.  Don't forget to name each file sequentially.  You will be able to see the existing disks in the folder each time you start the ripping process.  In our example the second disk would get named "02 - Whiskey Sour.mp3" and the third, "03 - Whiskey Sour.mp3" and so on...

Now that you have  your book as a collection of MP3 files, you can copy them to your player.  How you do that depends on the player.  Many players show up in the My Computer window and you can open it just like a drive to drag and drop your files into the appropriate folder.  There are so many different player and media manager combinations, I really can't cover them all here, so leave me a comment below if you have any questions and I will answer them as best as I can.

Issues

As you can see, fre:ac is well suited to this task.  If you find any issues, please let me know so I can address them.  One thing I have noticed is that when we encode all tracks as one, the program leaves the Track info blank in the final file.  I assume that most players would fall back to sorting the tracks by file name, but if your player has problems, it is a simple matter to edit the Track info in the Properties using Windows right click option, or use a program like MP3Tag to fix up the information that is embedded in the files. (called ID3 tags)  Most modern players use this information to be able to sort and present the files in may different ways.  

Title: When we have Encode to single file checked, fre:ac copies the Album info into Title, so some players that show title will show the same title for all disks.  Use one of the two methods above to change the title information if this is a problem on your player.

Thanks for reading!

Tag! You're it!

Tag! You're it!

Now that you have captured your audiobook files from the wild CD jungle, you will want to tag them before you release them back into the wild.

No, I haven't gotten a job with a nature show, but just like scientists and conservationists tag animals for future identification, audiobook addicts can benefit from proper tagging of the files they put on their players.

We are going to be reviewing a real jewel of a program called, simply enough, MP3Tag.  Now while you could use your media manager software like Windows Media Player or iTunes to add or correct the tags in your audio files, MP3Tag will make this task easy and quick.  Once you know a couple of the key features, you will be able to tag a complete set of files literally in seconds.

ID3 tags are a way to store information about a file within the file itself.  This prevents us from having to use long, cumbersome file names, or complex directory structures to identify audio files.  This allows player programs and devices like MP3 players to present us choices when browsing, like Artist, Album, Genre, and so on.  It also allows the player to display information about the file being played, including cover art and even lyrics.

Ideally, this process is transparent and the music and books that we put on our players have been tagged by the retailer like Audible, iTunes, Rhapsody, Zune Marketplace, and others.  You download the tracks, copy or sync them to the player and can browse them however you like and enjoy track information and album art without any effort.

In the real world, our content comes from a variety of sources, and not all of them provide the tags that allow us to easily browse and enjoy our music and books.  Thankfully there are tools that can help us in this task.

If you read the recent article on ripping audiobook CDs with BonkEnc, you may have noticed that it has some features to allow us to tag the audio files we create.  If you are like me, you will make some mistakes and since we use the Encode to single file feature, the Title tag ends up being the same as the Album tag.  Let's fix up a collection of files and you will see what I mean.

MP3Tag

MP3 Tag is a fairly simple grid style editor.  We are going to concentrate on just the few features you need.

You can download MP3Tag from the MP3Tag download page   The install process is simple and straightforward.  There are no toolbars ads or spyware to worry about.  All the defaults should be fine for most people and you can launch the program right away.  As with other open source software, many people have donated their time and skill, so consider donating to the authors if you find this program useful.

MP3Tag's Main screen

Click on the Change Directory button in the toolbar   and find the directory that contains the MP3 files that you want to work on.

Note the Subdirectory check box at the bottom of the file window.  If you leave it checked you can tag many directories of MP3 files at once.  It does not matter in our case, as there are no subdirectories in our book's folder.  (Hint: folders and directories are interchangeable terms in this tutorial)

You will see below that I have selected the folder that contains the files for Harlan Coben's "Promise Me" which was nine disks and so I have nine MP3 files.

I have noticed that the Title and Album are the same for all the files.  This makes it hard to tell the difference between the files when they are on the player, since most players display the title from the tag rather than the filename.

MP3Tag makes this an easy fix.  

1. Select all the files (you can click the first, hold Shift and click the last, or just press Ctrl A)

2. Click the second action button near the middle of the toolbar   This is the Filename to Tag feature.  You will get a window that lets you tell MP3Tag how to interpret the file name.

Since we want our Title to be the same as our file name, we just want "%title%" to be in the box (without the quotes) like this:

As soon as you do this, MP3Tag will show the title tag below the format string box.  Looks good!  Now we can click OK and MP3Tag will make the changes to all our files.  This beats having to change the title tag for a bunch of files individually.

3. Leaving all the files selected, we can look over to the left and check to see that the tags common to all our tracks are correct

You can see now that the Artist, Album, Year and Genre tags are correct and we know they are all the same for each file.  If a tag is different for one or more of the files, MP3Tag shows < keep > in that box.  If you see < keep > in one of the tags that should be the same for all files, just type in the correct tag and click the save button.

So to review:

1. Open the folder containing the audiobook files.

2. Select all files.  (Ctrl-A, or Click the first file and Shift Click the last)

3. Use the Filename to Tag feature to copy the filename to the Title tag.

4. Leave all selected and check the other tags. (Artist, Album, and Genre are the most important ones)

5. Save

Other features:

MP3Tag is very powerful and very configurable, so these are just a couple of the functions.  You might want to change the order of the columns like I did.  You just right click on one of the column headers and select Customize Columns.  I selected Path and moved it way down the list so the column was still available off to the right, but I now see the most important (to me) information without scrolling.  I did this for Album Artist too since that usually applies to music albums.

There are also a ton of automated functions.  In the tools menu there is an auto-numbering wizard that lets you add sequential track numbers to many files all in one go.  It even saves the tags for you when it's done.  You can add leading zeros too which is good when you have more than 10 tracks.  It even has "reset track numbers for each directory" allowing you to number the tracks in many directories at one time.

So experiment and have fun!

As always, I will answer any questions you have in the comments.