Once Upon A Time...I Can't Hear You Now!
Written: May 10 '04 (Updated May 11 '04)
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There is nothing worse than being unable to hear. Sure being unable to see, talk, and hear is worse but there is always hope of becoming a pinball wizard – trust me I’ve seen it happen.
Excuse the rather lame introduction but at this moment I am not too pleased with Audible.com. In fact, I’m down right mad enough I may never, ever, visit the site or purchase anything from their vast catalog ever again. My complaint does not lie with the website itself, but with the bundled software Audible deemed necessary to be downloaded in order to hear your purchases. This, 3rd party software as their tech department will so easily place blame on is the bain of my audio book experience.
It all started when I wanted to download Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men…and Other Excuses for the State of the Nation”. My wife and I had just gotten back from a weekend trip after listening to John Grisham’s “The Lost World” on CD, an audio book I had bought on CD many years ago only to disappear into my CD collection. Before leaving for Pismo Beach I saw it in my Case Logic and thought it might be fun to listen to it during the 3 hour drive. Turned out, we loved it. It was the perfect way to spend 3 hours on the drive. So, upon returning home I was excited to try out more audio books and navigated to Audible.com and their selection of online audio books.
I logged on to Audible and searched for Michael Moore. I found “Stupid White Men…” listed at the top and upon clicking learned that the audio book’s price was $22.95. A bit steep (the hardcover price is $24.95) but I really wanted it. I clicked past the offers from Audible to save me money on my purchase if I only signed up for a monthly contract (some requiring you to pay a monthly fee for at least 1 year) and purchased my first online audio book.
Having a cable modem, the 114MB file took about 12 minutes to download. After finishing, I expected to hear my audio book – but I could not, I also had to download the Audible Manager which would manage my files. I thought this a bit odd for I had chosen to download the book in Format 4 which the site said was the MP3 format. I already had a MP3 player, Winamp. Still, I pressed okay and said Yes to the standard license agreements and allowed the Audible Manager to be installed. After a brief restart, there it was, Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men…”
I double-clicked on the file and Winamp popped up. Winamp then proceeded to go into convulsions like it had been forced to swallow bits and bytes of poison. After closing Winamp, I tried again. Same result. I then scanned the Audible Manager for some other way to play the file – maybe Winamp couldn’t play Audible files (even though the website says they can – and yes, I had the most recent version of Winamp). I found a button labeled, Play and pressed it – it brought up Winamp again. Okay, I thought to myself, there must be some other options around here to select the default player and tell the Audible Manager not to use Winamp as the default player. I found those options, and pressed play again, and…Audible Manager needed to download even MORE 3rd Party/additional software to my PC.
I clicked okay and did another restart. I was not too happy at this point. It was 11pm, time for bed. After the restart, I clicked on shutdown. Went to bed.
The next morning I decided to tackle Audible again for the 15 minutes I had before leaving for work. I brought up my Audible Manager and there it was. Actually, there it wasn’t. My audio book was gone.
After searching around a bit I found the folder Audible uses to save media too and found out that my download was still there, but that for some reason Audible Manager just wouldn’t display that it was there anymore. I looked at the properties on the file and instead of it being the MP3 (Format 4) I expected it to be it had the extension of *.AA. No wonder Winamp went into convolutions.
To try to conclude my rant – I finally figured out how to get the Audio book to play. I should be happy…but then I tried to burn it to a CD and again, the 3rd party software Audible uses wouldn’t recognize my CD burner. I’ve had enough.
Audible.com looked like an amazing resource within the online community. Audio books are nothing new but they were always given the wall of shame at most bookstores perhaps until someone figured out you could in essence read a book while driving which many, myself included, saw as a great opportunity to pass time while doing something other than blasting music loud enough to drown out emergency vehicles.
The main site welcomes you and invites you to search from their 18,000 audio book database. You can search by keyboard, author, or title. Once you find a selection you are given a brief synopsis of the book and the various formats it is available in. The lower the format number the smaller the file (aka the faster the download) but also the smaller the file the worse the quality. Some books are only available in Format 1 which is the equivalent of hearing audio over a telephone. From there the quality passes through “sounds like a cassette”, “an FM radio”, and finally an “MP3 file”. The more recent the book the more likely it will be recorded in MP3 quality.
For non-members the Audible price doesn’t get any “wow factors”. Some older books may range between $7 and $10 but more recent books closely match their hardback counterparts. I’m not sure what the member price of these books are, but in some cases it could be free, for Audible does have monthly plans which include 1 to 2 books included with each monthly fee. I don’t know if there are discounts after those included 2 – and I didn’t care to find out.
From what I eventually heard, I was happy with my audio book. I am however not happy with the hoops I had to go through and will probably have to go through if I ever want to burn my audio book to a CD. All of this would have been nil, if Audible would have just given me my audio file in actual MP3 format as they said they would. Then I could have used my own 3rd party software to which I know works – but no.
Stupid white dotcom.
Recommended:
No
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Michael Moore: Stupid White Men
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Epinions.com ID:
lynus
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Location: Las Vegas, NV
Reviews written: 584
Trusted by: 169 members
About Me:
Slowly trying to get back to the thick of things.
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