One reason i don’t do this is because I believe in being spontaneous and reacting to circumstances as they come.

Another reason is that we can’t tell what the future holds.

So why all the preamble?

I had a plan and my first idea was to refer readers to one of my favourite sites at mygazines.com.

I went to check the site and this is the message I received:

“Dear valued members, visitors and publishers,

Due to monetary reasons and the state of the global economy, we unfortunately must close mygazines.com. We simply ran out of funds to support the daily operations.

We thank you for your patronage.”

Well, it’s a sign of the times.

Not only banks but businesses of all kinds are falling by the wayside and behind each failure, lost investments and jobs are the stuff of human misery.

So, what to do?

Well luckily some sites still survive.

One of my favourite magazine sites is Magatopia at:

http://www.magatopia.com/index.html

As I’ve stated I’m a photographer and this site is particularly strong on Arts magazines.

I love to read online magazines like Shutterbug and Digital Photography Now.

You’re sure to find something to your taste at Magatopia, so have a look when you’ve got time to read.

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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.

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This time as I’ve been reading some of the interesting blogs that come to me through BlogRush I came upon this site:

http://tiffanycolter.blogspot.com/

If you sign up with Tiffany, she’ll send you chapters of her novel “A Face in the Shadow” every week.

I suggest that you sign up – I have – and tell her what you think.

Tiffany’s got quite a few interesting things to say about a writer’s life.

I’ll be back to the splitting soon

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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

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You might want to split each file into smaller segments so that you can find each part more easily on your audio player.

A short while ago I suggested recording from the radio.

If you do this, you’ll probably get files which are not only rather long – Gilbert White’s the “Natural History of Selbourne”is over an hour for example but,

You’ll also probably have bits at the beginning and end of your recording which you don’t want.

You might like to cut off the unwanted portions of the recording – top and tail so to speak.

Soon, I’ll go through how to cut and split recordings step by step but for now, let’s go and get the free software to do the job.

You’ll need:

mp3 Direct Cut (http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html)

and

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

together with a component part

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

(This is vital as without it, you’ll get no sound.

Details also on the Free Resources Page.

Next time, we’ll look at cutting and splitting in detail.

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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.

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This post was meant to go out a week or so ago but somehow I got it all wrong and didn’t publish properly.

Better late than never – this is the post

I’ll be posting again in a couple of weeks.

Like most families here in Bulgaria we’re off to the seaside.

I’m packing plenty of free books – including some audio books I’ve specially prepared.

What I’ve planned for the next few posts:

Freebies from commercial companies
Reviews
Editing audio files.
Finding free magazines.
Looking at podcasts.

If any of you are off on holiday too, enjoy yourselves.

I’ll report back soon.

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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.

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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

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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.

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