{"id":891,"date":"2009-12-28T19:41:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-29T00:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=891"},"modified":"2009-12-28T19:41:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-29T00:41:00","slug":"audiobooks-and-the-nintendo-dsi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=891","title":{"rendered":"Audiobooks and the Nintendo DSi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps this is what getting old feels like, when the people you idolized in college end up holding the mike on Morning Edition<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I went through my standard morning routine: breakfast, cleanliness, then the drive in to work listening to whatever I’ve DLed on to my flashcard and jammed in the DSi.  This time it was a Neil Gaiman NPR piece on audiobooks<\/a>.  “Ho ho,” I thought.  “If only our dear Mr. Gaiman knew I was listening to his story in the same way I listen to audiobooks!”. <\/p>\n

Podiobooks<\/a>, to be precisely correct.  Over the last few months I’ve been… ripping?  burning?  let’s just say “moving” Nathan Lowell<\/a>‘s solar clipper series to my DSi.  Podiobooks breaks their content up into roughly 30-minute segments, which makes for very easy file management.<\/p>\n

There are a few complexities involved in moving audio to the DSi.  My process is as follows:<\/p>\n

1 – Download the desired audio files to my laptop.
2 – Convert them to the required mp4 format using Foobar<\/a>.  (Vive la open source!)
3 – Drag and drop on to the flash card.
4 – Pop it (out of the lappy) and lock it (into the DSi).
5 –  Plug a male-to-male headphone cable into the “Aux In” port in the car.
6 – Enjoy some space-faring adventure. <\/p>\n

This is my first experience with audiobooks, and I have to confess to being completely hooked.  Lowell’s story, a melange of the high seas (think Master and Commander<\/i>) and deep space, is pocked with memorable characters and is heavy on the dialogue, which makes for a listening experience somewhere between an old radio drama and a campfire story.  Reading it as a novel would be a very different experience; I would expect more detailed descriptions of the environments, and perhaps some of the more often repeated phrases (e.g. in Double Share<\/i>, the protagonist shrugs.  A lot.) would fly past without notice like the ubiquitous “he said” does.  This begs a question as to whether or not the accessibility of the spoken word due to more developed technology is bringing about something akin to a revival of a near-dying art (which is addressed in Gaiman’s piece).  The listener certainly feels more of a connection to the author than seems likely via the page, at least not until PhD-levels of repeated readings.  <\/p>\n

As for the DSi’s sound function, I call it a win.  I have had no issues with the sound quality, though admittedly spoken word doesn’t necessarily require hi-fi-phononess.  The interface is easy and seems made for episodic content.  So give it a go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps this is what getting old feels like, when the people you idolized in college end up holding the mike on Morning Edition. I went through my standard morning routine: breakfast, cleanliness, then the drive in to work listening to whatever I’ve DLed on to my flashcard and jammed in the DSi.  This time it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}