I don't know much about the Audiobook format but is it possible that the empeg may be programmed to play them?




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Certainly, the empeg can play any of the audiobooks found at http://genres.mp3.com/music/books_spoken/

Audiobooks suffer from a central problem with distribution, at least here in the States.

The audience for audiobooks is not generally large enough to support multiple distribution formats. And the largest audience for audiobooks can be targetted by supporting the tape casette format, because of the large installed base of car casette players.

Of course, this distribution model engenders a fantastically expensive pricing schedule (I don't watch it closely, but I have seen $50 casette books for abridged material) that has prevented the audiobook format from reaching more than a fringe audience.

Clearly, if ever a publishing genre could benefit from digital distribution, audiobooks could. I would certainly pay $10 to download a 600-meg audiobook file in 96k MP3 format on my broadband internet connection, so that I could listen to it in the car on my Empeg. But I am obviously not representative of the general consumer populace right now.

Presently, your best bet would be to go to an audiobook rental shop to pick up audiobooks on casette or CD format, and record them as MP3 files yourself to be stored on your Empeg.

Corby
6-Gig Blue, SN#320

We did some work with an audio book company last year, and have had meetings with several others. The interest is certainly there, but nobody seems very motivated to follow through with a product.

Rob

on that note, [and I'm speaking to empeg programmers here...] any possibility of compiling a text-speech program program for the empeg? While there's definately a lack of audiobooks in mp3 format, there's plenty of audiotexts...
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

I have a couple of audio books in audible format (www.audible.com)
It's basically telephone quality, about a meg an hour (I think).
However, their windows player uses all the idle processor power (killing the rc5 client), whilst the realplayer plugin seems ok, so they might have an optimisation problem somewhere... =)
It might make a nice empeg plugin at some point...

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

My company uses text-to-speech, and I think we wrote the(our) engine for it. I'll see if I can get the code. No promises, and there may be free versions somewhere.
Jason

_~= Dearing =~_
"WAY too happy about having #99."

Go to your local library. You can probably check out books on cd and rip them to mp3.



Pharf