New audio format for audio cds?

harvpa · Post by **harvpa** » January 11th, 2006, 1:31 pm

Wondering if maybe a new media format might be considered...

I made audio cds of one of the librivox books, but the librivox disclaimer gets rather annoying for every chapter when listening that way and I feel unneccesary. The way things are broken up in chapters makes it hard to really fill an audio cd as well.

Both of those things make sense on MP3 files, but make audio cds awkward.

Could there maybe be an audio cd iso or something like that where there is just a disclaimer at the beginning of the cd and maybe at the end? And the audio is done such as to fill an audio cd.

I know that would entail a bit of work, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested in it.

Thoughts?

Post by **hugh** » January 11th, 2006, 1:46 pm

hmm.... an interesting idea. i wonder if there is an easy way to do this? techhies, any takers?

raynr · Post by **raynr** » January 11th, 2006, 2:07 pm

Isn't there any bandwith problem? For example: Mark Twain's Conneticut Yankee has a playtime of 11 hours and 36 minutes. That means you would need 12 ISOs with 700 MB each -- ca. 8.5 GB.

An iso means that you just burn an image of an Audio-CD, without any compression. Technically it's easy, any burning programm like Nero can do this: select the mp3s you want to make an audio CD of, define "make audio CD" and burn it as an image -- finished.

We would have a little bit more to do: cut the disclamer out of the beginning of the mp3 (except for the first file on a CD) and resize the files to get 5 to 10 files on the CD (typcial for Audiobooks on CD).

But the main problem remains the file size you would have to download...

vee · Post by **vee** » January 11th, 2006, 2:23 pm

Raynr is right about the final size of the ISOs. They would be pretty enormous, and that assumes that we can perfectly fill a CD. I'm not sure that we would want to change the chapter format since it would be annoying to change a CD in the middle of a chapter. We could possibly add more track marks so that it is easier to navigate on a CD player, like splitting long chapters into three tracks, but again it's more work.

After I finish editing and recording the chapters that I am currently responsible for I could take a book that we already have and master a set of ISOs so that we can get a better idea of what this would look like and what the file sizes would be. Any book we'd like to try?

Post by **hugh** » January 11th, 2006, 2:30 pm

i guess the idea would be more for sending out physical CDs?

harvpa · Post by **harvpa** » January 11th, 2006, 2:42 pm

One possiblity I've thought of is that when people record books, they wouldn't put the librivox disclaimer and book name at the beginning of each chapter, but would just record them once in a separate file.

Those files, the disclaimer/title, and each chapter would then be sent to someone, who would put those files through a process which would create a CD iso, and prepend the disclaimer and book name to the CD iso and mp3 files, which would then be made available.

Of course talking about things is easy, actually doing it might be impossible to script, or at the least a bit work intensive to do manually.

vee · Post by **vee** » January 11th, 2006, 2:54 pm

I would think that our primary target is currently for download so it would make more sense for us to simply delete the disclaimer/book title (dbt) from the files when we are creating the CD master. Since we aren't sure how many CDs would be needed or which would be the first chapter on each CD we would need multiple disclaimers in any case.

For a commercial CD that I've been working on, the publisher did not want the disclaimer to be a separate track because it made it too easy to skip. It takes up the first 15 seconds of the first track, so it's not terribly annoying, but you have to actually fast forward through it and not just hit next. I would think we would want to do something similar for the masters if we were to put them on Lulu.

raynr · Post by **raynr** » January 11th, 2006, 3:10 pm

hugh wrote:i guess the idea would be more for sending out physical CDs?

Definitely, if we ever wanted to start this on a regular basis, we would store this ISOs on a webserver somewhere. When anyone requests physical CDs you can use the images to quickly burn the CDs and send them to the people who request the book (or they could download the images themselves).

If anyone's interested in: I could try to produce such images over the weekend (I don't think I have time before that). For example Alice in Wonderland would result in 3 CDs (=3 ISO), a little princess 7 or 8 CDs.

I think the best way would be to make on the first track on each CD the disclaimer including all the people who read the book. The other tracks would then consist only of the text splitted into reasonable sizes (ca. 5 to 10 min).

harvpa · Post by **harvpa** » January 11th, 2006, 5:31 pm

I think that I found all the information needed to create a process that could be automated to create CDs and remove part from the mp3 files...

http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/mp3splt_page/home.php

for splitting mp3s...

and

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/MP3-CD-Burning.html

for automating a burn process

The only thing that is needed is to know how long it is from the start of the file to the start of the chapter, mp3split might be able to be scripted to find this with its silence detection, not sure how good it would work though.

You can also using CDRDAO break the .wav file into shorter audio tracks so that one can find their place on an audio cd without having to fast forward through a single long chapter track.

The leaning on these programs are towards Linux, but I believe that they can also be made (with some work

) to work in Windows and possibly on a Mac.

raynr · Post by **raynr** » January 11th, 2006, 5:49 pm

Thanks for the links for the programs, I will take a lock at them. It's no problem that they are on Linux, I have both systems on my computer (Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux). Nevertheless, a completely automated process seems impossible to me, because the length of the disclaimer differs from file to file and to break up big files in reasonable sizes needs an inspection of the files for reasonable breaking points.

Rainer

vee · Post by **vee** » January 11th, 2006, 5:55 pm

If we were going to use something like Lulu I don't think we would necessarily need to store the ISO. When someone wants to purchase the CD set the would goto Lulu's website to place the order and Lulu takes the responsibility for keeping the masters, we just have to create the first set, and any album art (case cover and label I guess, haven't tried it). I'm thinking making the master's won't really take much more than the time to burn them to make the first set of ISOs, since the files are mostly there, just need to be cleaned up.

I like the idea of one track at the beginning listing the disclaimer and all the reader's (maybe we can use the recorded voice of each so they're more identifiable). The album cover can be something simple with the Librivox logo, title of the work, author and the back would be the tracks/chapters/readers?

kri · Post by **kri** » January 11th, 2006, 6:26 pm

Wow, after reading this thread I'm becoming more and more psyched about this idea. I have no clue if enough (or any) people would care enough to want to buy a CD of librivox recordings, but I might for certain books. I don't have an MP3 player or iPod, and creating a CD of my own of books would be ridiculous considering how many CDs it would require. Since I want to listen to some of the books I'm listening to at work, this might be something I'd be interested in. Just giving you some idea that the work for this wouldn't be totally in vain.

I wouldn't even mind helping with the tedious process of removing the disclaimers from chapters, if such was needed.

harvba · Post by **harvba** » January 11th, 2006, 6:50 pm

The reason for Paul asking this is we would like to make cd's for our girls. They love to listen to stories and we thought it would be great to burn a cd without having to here the disclaimer at the beging of each chapter. With the books taking up lots of cds we stated to use rewritable ones. By the way our oldest can now say the disclamer word for word fromthe recording of the Little Princess.

kayray · Post by **kayray** » January 11th, 2006, 6:53 pm

harvba wrote: By the way our oldest can now say the disclamer word for word fromthe recording of the Little Princess. :lol:

Hey, that's a useful skill for when she's ready to begin reading for us on her own ;-)

Everyone in my house knows that disclaimer by heart. I'm afraid the parakeet will begin to recite it soon.

Kara

Rev. Steve · Post by **Rev. Steve** » January 11th, 2006, 11:03 pm

If you guys are serious about this I would be willing to mail - as in usps - 2 DVDs worth of AIFF files for the Connecticut Yankee, to - whoever would like to try this - but there is no way I am going to spend the 3 or 4 days it would require to upload the 8.11 gigs they take up.