Tag: Audiobooks

(Audio)book review: We Are Legion (We Are Bob).

I have not posted a book review in almost a year, and I have not even written one for Goodreads, which I probably should do as well. I feel kind of awful for it because I do have a long list of good titles I appreciated in the meantime. So let me spend a few words on this one.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) tickled me in the list of Audible books for a while because the name sounded so ludicrous I was expecting something almost along the lines of the Hitchikers’ Guide To The Galaxy. It was not that level of humour, but the book didn’t really disappoint either.

The book starts in the first scene in present time, with the protagonist going to a cryogenic facility… and you can tell from the cover that’s just a setup of course. I found it funny from the first scenes that the author clearly is talking of something he knows directly, so I wasn’t entirely too surprised when I found that he’s a computer programmer. I’m not sure what it is with people in my line of work deciding to write books, but the results are quite often greatly enjoyable, even if it takes a while to get into them. On this note, Tobias Klausmann of Gentoo fame wrote a two-part series1, which I definitely recommend.

Once you get on with the main stage for the book, it starts off in the direction you expect with spaceships and planets as the covers lets you to imagine. Some of the reviews I read before buying the book found it very lightweight and no-brainer, but I don’t see myself agreeing. While taking it with a lot of spirit and humour, and a metric ton of pop-culture references2, the topics that are brought up include self-determination, the concept of soul as seen by an atheist point of view, global politics as seen from lightyears away3, and the vast multitudes of “oneselves”.

Spoilers in this paragraph, yes definitely spoilers, and a bit of text so you may not read them out of line of sight. Go back to the following paragraph if you don’t want any. Indeed, it’s very hard to tell, and a question that the book spends quite a bit of time pondering over without an answer, whether the character we see in the first scene is actually the protagonist of the book. Because what we have later is a computer “replicant” of the memories and consciousness of him… and a multitudes of copies of that, each acting more or less differently from the original, leaving open the question whether the copies are losing something in the process, or whether it is the knowledge of not being the “original” that make them change. I found this maybe even more profound than the author intended.

Spoilers aside, I found the book enjoyable. It’s not an all-out bright and shiny future, but it’s also not the kind of grim and dark dystopia that appears to be a dime a dozen nowadays. The one thing that still bothers me a little bit, and that probably is because I would have fallen into the same trap, is that the vast majority of the book focuses on technical problems and solutions, though to be fair it pulls it off (in my opinion) quite healthily, rather than by hiding all the human factors away into “someone else’s problem” territory. It reminded me of an essay I had to write in middle school about the “school of the future”, and I ended up not spending a single word on people, even after the teacher pointed out I should have done so and got me to rewrite it. I’m glad there are people (who are not me) studying humanities.

I found it funny that the Wikipedia page about the book insisted on pointing out that reviewers noted the lack of female characters. That’s true, there are a handful of throwaway women throughout the book, but no major character. I don’t know if there was any way around it given the plot as it stands now though, so I wouldn’t read it too much into it, as the book itself feels a lot like a trip into one’s own essence, and I’m not sure I’d expect an author to be able to analyse this way someone else but themselves. I have not read/listened to the other books in the series (though I did add them to my list now), so maybe that changes with the change of focus, not sure.

As for the audiobook itself, which I got through Audible where it was at “special price” $1.99, I just loved the production. Ray Porter does a fantastic job, and since the book is all written in the first person (from somewhat different points of view), his voicework to make you know which point of view is speaking is extremely helpful not to get lost.

All in all, I’ve really enjoyed the book, and look forward to compare with the rest of the series. If you’re looking for something that distracts you from all the dread that is happening right now in the world, and can give you a message of “If we get together, we can do it!”, then this is a worthy book.

  1. I hadn’t realized book two was out until I looked Tobias up on Amazon. I’ll have stern words with him next time I see him for not warning me!
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  2. This happens most of the time with geeks writing books, although not all the time thankfully. From one side it does build a nice sense of camaraderie with the protagonists because they feel like “one of us” but on the other hand sometimes it feels too much. Unless it’s part of the story, like here or in Magic 2.0.
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  3. Pun totally intended.
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Free Idea: Free Software stack for audiobooks

This post is part of a series of free ideas that I’m posting on my blog in the hope that someone with more time can implement. It’s effectively a very sketched proposal that comes with no design attached, but if you have time you would like to spend learning something new, but no idea what to do, it may be a good fit for you.

This is clearly not a new idea, as I posted about something very similar over eight years ago. At the time I was looking for a way of encoding audibooks coming from audio CD in a format that was compatible with the iPod Classic. Since then, Apple appears to have done their best to make the audiobooks experience on iOS the worst possible, to the point that I don’t really use my iPod Touch as my primary audiobook player any more.

As an aside to the free idea, which can probably give a bit more context for you all, let me describe the problems I have with the current approach to audiobooks by Apple. A few iOS major versions ago, they decided to move the audiobooks handling from the Music app to the iBooks app; this would be reasonable, given that they are books, and it was always a bit strange to have them in a separate application, but it also meant you lost the ability to build playlists with them.

Playlists with audiobooks are great, because they allow you to “stitch” multiple books of the same series, so that you can play them for hours on end, for instance if you need them to sleep. I used to have a playlist for the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy radio series and one for the books, one for Dresden Files, and one for the News Quiz, including both the collected editions in CD by BBC, my own “audiobooks” built out of the podcasts, and the more recent podcast episodes that I have not collected into audiobook files yet.

So what is the idea? There are two components that, as far as I can see, are currently heavily lacking in the FLOSS world. The first is a way to generate audiobook files, which is what I complained eight years ago. Indeed, if you look even at a random sample on Project Gutenberg, the audiobook is actually a ton of files (47!) each with a chapter in them. A proper audiobook file would be a single file, with chapter markers, and per-chapter metadata (chapter title, and in that case, the performer).

It’s more than just a matter of having a single file to move around. While of course the hardware improvements made a number of these points moot, the original reason to have a single big file over multiple small files was to avoid having to seek to a different point in the disk in-between chapters. It also allows the decoder to keep going, between chapters, as there is no “end of stream” but rather just a marker that at a given point in time some different metadata applies. Again, as I said this is no longer as relevant as it used to be, but it’s also not entirely gone.

The other component that is currently lacking, is a good playback solution. While VLC can obviously play those files right now, and if I’m not mistaken it also extracts the per-chapter metadata correctly, it lacks two features that make enjoying audiobooks possible. The first is possibly complicated, and relates to the ability to store bookmarks and current-playing time. While supposedly VLC supports the feature for resuming from last playback, I have heard it’s still sometimes unreliable (I have no idea how it’s implemented), plus it does not support just bookmarking a given time in a file/book. Bookmarking is particularly important when listening to non-novel audiobooks, as you may want to go back to it afterwards, to re-listen to advice or take a reference to further details.

The other feature is basically UI heavy, and it involves mostly the mobile UI (at least the Android one) and is the ability to scan backward and forward in the file. You have probably seen this in other players including Netflix’s own app, that allow you to scan back 30 seconds — in audiobooks it’s also useful to scan forward 30 seconds, particularly when considering the bookmarks above.

As usual for Free Ideas I have no time to work on this myself. I can give the idea details out, and depending on things I may be able to contribute to a bounty on it, but otherwise, no code I can share about this yet.

Ramblings on audiobooks

In one of my previous posts I have noted I’m an avid audiobook consumer. I started when I was at the hospital, because I didn’t have the energy to read — and most likely, because of the blood sugar being out of control after coming back from the ICU: it turns out that blood sugar changes can make your eyesight go crazy; at some point I had to buy a pair of €20 glasses simply because my doctor prescribed me a new treatment and my eyesight ricocheted out of control for a week or so.

Nowadays, I have trouble sleeping if I’m not listening to something, and I end up with the Audible app installed in all my phones and tablets, with at least a few books preloaded whenever I travel. Of course as I said, I keep the majority of my audiobooks in the iPod, and the reason is that while most of my library is on Audible, not all of it is. There are a few books that I have bought on iTunes before finding out about Audible, and then there are a few I received in CD form, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Complete Radio Series which is my among my favourite playlists.

Unfortunately, to be able to convert these from CD to a format that the iPod could digest, I ended up having to buy a software called Audiobook Builder for Mac, which allows you to rip CDs and build M4B files out of them. What’s M4B? It’s the usual mp4 format container, just with an extension that makes iTunes consider it an audiobook, and with chapter markings in the stream. At the time I first ripped my audiobooks, ffmpeg/libav had no support for chapter markings, so that was not an option. I’ve been told that said support is there now, but I have not tried getting it to work.

Indeed, what I need to find out is how to build an audiobook file out of a string of mp3 files, and I have no idea how to fix that now that I no longer have access to my personal iTunes account on a mac to re-download the Audiobook Builder and process them. In particular, the list of mp3s that I’m looking forward to merge together are the years 2013 and 2014 of BBC’s The News Quiz, to which I’m addicted and listen continuously. Being able to join them all together so I can listen to them with a multi-day-running playlist is one of the very few things that still let me sleep relatively calmly — I say relatively because I really don’t remember when was the last time I have slept soundly in about an year by now.

Essentially, what I’d like is for Audible to let me sideload some content (the few books I did not buy from them, and the News Quiz series that I stitch together from the podcast), and create a playlist — then for what I’m concerned I don’t have to use an iPod at all. Well, beside the fact that I’d have to find a way to shut up notifications while playing audiobooks. Having Dragons of Autumn Twilight interrupted by the Facebook pop notification is not something that I’m looking forward for most of the time. And in some cases I even have had some background update disrupting my playback so there is definitely space for improvement.

Encoding iPod-compatible audiobooks with Free Software

Since in the last few days I’ve been able to rest also thanks to the new earphones I’ve finally been able to think again of multimedia as well as Gentoo. But just to preserve my sanity, and to make sure I do something I can reuse to rest even better, I decided to look into something new, and something that I would like to solve if I could. Generating iPod-compatible audibook files from the BBC Radio CDs I got.

The audiobook that you buy from the iTunes Store are usually downloaded in multiple files, one per CD of the original CD release, sometimes with chapter markings to be able to skip around. Unfortunately they also are DRM’d so analysing them is quite a bit of a mess, and I didn’t go to much extent to identify how that is achieved. The reason why I’d like to find, or document, the audibook format is a two-fold interoperability idea. The first part is being able to play iPod-compatible audiobooks with Free Software with the same chapter marking system working, and the other is (to me more concerning to be honest) being able to rip a CD and create a file with chapter markings that would work on the iPod properly. As it is, my Audiobooks section on the iPod is messed up because, for instance, each piece of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which is a different track on CD, gets a single file, which is thus a single entry in the Audiobooks series. To deal with that I had to create playlists for the various phases, and play them from there. Slightly suboptimal, although it works.

Now, the idea would be to be able to rip a CD (or part of a CD) in a single M4B file, audiobook-style, and add chapter markings with the tracks’ names to make the thing playable and browsable properly. Doing so with just Free Software would be the idea. Being able to have a single file for multiple CDs would also be of help. The reason why I’m willing to spend time on this rather than just using the playlists is that it seems to me like the battery of the iPod gets consumed much sooner when using multiple files, probably because it has to seek around to find them, while a single file would be loaded incrementally without spending too much time.

In this post I really don’t have much in term of ideas about implementation; I know the first thing I have to do is to find a EAC -style ripper for Linux, based on either standard cdparanoia or libcdio’s version. For those who didn’t understand my last sentence, if I recall correctly, EAC can also produce a single lossless audio file, and a CUE file where the track names are timecoded, instead of splitting the CD in multiple files per track. Starting from such a file would be optimal, since we’d just need to encode it in AAC to have the audio track of the audiobook file.

What I need to find is how the chapter information is encoded in the final file. This wouldn’t be too difficult, since the MP4 format has quite a few implementations and I already have worked on it before. The problem is that, being DRM’d, analysing the Audiobooks themselves is not the best idea. Luckily, I remembered that there is one BBC podcast that provides an MP4 file with chapter markings: Best of Chris Moyles Enhanced which most likely use the same feature. Unfortunately, the mp4dump utility provided by mpeg4ip fails to dump that file, which means that either the file is corrupt (and how does iTunes play that?) or the utility is not perfect (much more likely).

So this brings me back to something I was thinking about before, the fact that we have no GPL-compatible MP4-specific library to handle parsing and writing of MP4 files. The reason for this is most likely the fact that the standards don’t come cheap, and that most Free Software activists in the multimedia area tend to think that Xiph is always the answer (I disagree), while the pragmatic side of the multimedia area would just use Matroska (which I admit is probably my second best choice, if it was supported by actual devices). And again, please don’t tell me about Sandisk players and other flash-based stuff. I don’t want flash-based stuff! I have more than 50GB of stuff on my iPod!

Back to our discussion, I’m going to need to find or write some tool to inspect MP4 files, I don’t want to fix mpeg4ip because of MPL license it’s released under, and I also think the whole thing is quite overengineered. Unfortunately this does not really help me much since I don’t have the full specs of the format handy, and I’ll have to do a lot of guessing to get it to work. On the other hand, this should be quite an interesting project, for as soon as I have time. If you have pointers or are interested in this idea, feel free to chime in.

Buying sleep (by the minute)

One of the worst thing that can happen in somebody’s life is when your dreams are scaring you out of your own sleep. As it turns out I’m in one of those situations. A nice period of my life ended just before Christmas, and now I’m in a bit of a pinch, with a late job, and no future (stable) job in view. I’m also out of luck with publishers since the last article I submitted to LWN was not even worth a reply, it seems.

I should be at least well happy about my health, one would expect, given that I am feeling better after the surgery and I just need to visit the hospital for some check-ups now. But even that is out of schedule, since I was supposed to be in for January, and it’s middle February now. The professor I had to reach is unreachable, so I had to pass through another doctor in the staff (whom I’m very grateful to for my previous staying too!).

But as it is said in Italy “one Pope dead, a new one is made”; I admit I’m not sure what the English equivalent would be but I’d expect it to refer to kings.

I’m currently feeling in quite a bluish mood but it’s going to be just fine as soon as I get some good nights’ sleep; relaxed sleep. The problem as I said is that my own dreams, or rather the content and the characters of the dreams I’m having lately, chase me out of bed. Even though I cannot remember the dreams by themselves, the general mood follows me when I wake up and, even though they should be pleasant dreams, they upset me very much.

Luckily I learnt to fight dreams, and nightmares, since I went to the hospital. My way of keeping them away from my mind is to listen to something that turns my attention to something much different just before sleeping. Podcasts have helped a lot about that, but sometimes I need more, longer content I haven’t listened to before. This is especially true when, like right now, Bill Maher is not on HBO so I cannot listen to new Real Time’s podcast episodes. For these times I corrupt a bit of my soul and buy audiobooks from the iTunes Store, yes with the freedom-hungry DRM on.

I was thus quite pleased when an anonymous sent me The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy CDs from BBC Radio (and I have to say I envy British people for BBC Radio 4, News Quiz is one of my favourite shows). Even though it also sprouted for me a technical problem: how to convert the CDs in a format that makes use of 100% iPod’s features using just Free Software? I’m afraid I’m unable to answer that question just yet but I hope to be able to soon. Also thanks to the (for now unknown since it hasn’t arrived yet) person who sent me “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” CDs. I’m not sure what it is but I find the British humour refreshing. Yes I know this is neither normal nor sane …

The problem is that, the way this is going I’m unable to rest, even when I sleep, and thus I cannot work for more than a few hours on Free Software without my head starting to ache. And it’s difficult to sleep in the first place. While I would like to try cutting down on coffee, it turns out that I’m quite addicted to caffeine to the point that twice already in the past three weeks, when I tried to stay a day without getting one I would get a migraine so powerful I would be unable to crawl out of bed.

Anyway so that you know, even if I haven’t blogged about it in a while, nor I have opened new bugs, the tinderbox (or tinderflame to make it distinct from Patrick’s) is still working and crunching data. The new disks do help, since there was one (I’m afraid I know which one, I’ll write about it specifically in the future) that would make the system go stuck on pdflush, which as you might guess is not the nicest of the things. Now it seems to be working better.

Anyway, if you wish I made a special list to see if I can solve my sleep deprivation (although I’m waiting already a few things I ordered myself, so I should be set for a while), but even more importantly, there are two thing I’m going to ask users and developers reading me alike.

If you’re an user, try to raise concern with upstream projects about problems like proper --as-needed usage, parallel build and similar, I know my blog isn’t exactly the nicest place to look up information from but it should have enough to go around with issues like that. Any upstream package that fixes parallel make, --as-needed or autotools by itself is one less package I’ll have to look at when I decide to push forward my agenda of having proper packages around.

If instead you’re a developer, please help me by at least reviewing what I write, correcting me if needed, and especially submitting patches to my projects if you see they are wrong or incomplete. Having people collaborate on my projects is one thing I always miss.

xine, Matrox and audiobooks

One thing I’ve been trying to do some cleanup of my stuff lately, as I have a lot of things I don’t use anymore and I thus have to get rid of. This especially consists of older hardware, stuff I haven’t used in years, if I ever use it at all (some stuff is just stuff I got, used computers that were on their road to the trash, from which I usually took a few things).

To try getting rid of this stuff I’ve been trying eBay for the first time in my life. I was able to sell away an old nVidia video card and the infamous Pokémon Sapphire game in Italian; the money I got will start the “new box found” which I have to prepare as I need to replace Enterprise (I’m considering the idea of an 8-core Xeon box, so that it can continue serving me for the years to come, even if I need to spend more for it right now). Rebuilding FFmpeg, xine-lib and xine-ui many times a day to improve the situation is a very time-consuming job.

Most of what I’ve been trying to sell now is very stupid stuff, like old soundcards and network cards that only do 10Mbps, so I have no refrain from trying to sell it. One thing I’m not sure on what to do. It’s an old Matrox video card, I think a Mystique PCI. Not really a good videocard, not like I need it at all. But there’s one thing that it can be useful for: testing DirectFB/SyncFB in xine.

I didn’t even know of having it, I recovered it from a very old piece of junk, but I tested it once and I know it does work. I could be testing those outputs too, which at the moment I’m sure are mostly unmaintained in xine, especially the 1.2 branch.

But to do that, I need a computer where to put it (I don’t know if it ever works on AMD64), and I need time to pour on that. So here is the question: does anybody want me to take a look after SyncFB/DirectFB in xine? If there is somebody, then I’ll consider it and as soon as I’m done with my current jobs (mid-February, early March) I’ll see to put the card to use.

If I don’t hear from anyone in, say, a few months, I’ll likely just try to sell the card away. Please say so if you want DirectFB/SyncFB support. An appreciation token is also well appreciated and might actually move this up in my priority list, but not really needed ;)

Talking about audiobooks, I found myself having trouble to sleep again, lately, so I’m using podcasts to sleep. It’s actually nice, especially since BBC seems to have quite a few interesting podcasts (yeah I listen to them in English, it actually makes me feel better to listen to stuff in English rather than Italian before sleeping). Unfortunately the podcasts are never much long, and that is a bit of a problem as often one podcast is not enough to make me sleep.

I’ve been re-listening to “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, which I bought from the iTunes Store while I was in the hospital, and which I never was able to complete actually (I wasn’t able to listen to the third part), and that also is nice. I don’t have the force to read in bed lately, as I tend to get to sleep very very late, when I should be sleeping already for a while, and audiobooks are useful for that. Of course, now I don’t have the urgency I had in the hospital, so I can avoid buying them from the DRM-encumbered iTunes Store, and I was looking at the CD versions on Amazon, the whole Hitchhiker’s series looks nice.

Has anybody been listening to audiobooks? I would very much like some suggestion on what to look for and what to look out for. I seen that BBC is full of audiobooks (they seem to have a different company for those), but I’d like some opinions about their quality, especially I’d like them not to be abridged versions.

On the wishlist I put, beside the Hitchhiker’s boxset, The Pelican Brief (by John Grisham, I like his books, and I didn’t see the movie) and The Hobbit (I loved the book, but I read it only in Italian, an audiobook might be a good way to begin an English Tolkien experience). Other suggestions will be appreciated, maybe I’ll do an order for those before next month, as I really need something to help me sleeping.

Looking for iTunes audiobooks users

So, I’ll use this blog of mine for an appeal. I’m looking for some iTunes users who bought or regularly buy audiobooks from the iTMS.

The reason of this has to be seen in a request from Ian Monroe (hi Ian ;) ), coming from an amaroK user who wanted for amaroK to recognize correctly m4b files when using xine engine.

m4b files seems to be simply m4a files with a different extension, so that iTunes know that it should allow bookmarking them. All the documentation seems to point to m4b being simply an alias to m4a.

For this reason i patched xine in Gentoo so that it detects them as m4a, I want the best features for my users, but after sending the patch upstream Mike Melanson had an interesting question: does iTunes call m4b also protected files?

Unfortunately, although I did register to iTMS providing a credit card identifier, it seems like I can’t find “free” audiobooks as it seemed to be on the first things I heard from users, so I can’t test that myself. Although I would like to buy one of the audiobooks for test, their price is a bit over my current possibilities (yikes, €25.95 – not even dollars! – for The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal by Lilian Jackson Braun).

So here is the deal, if somebody bought or is going to buy an audiobook from iTMS, please mail me the extension of the file, and try to see if it is protected/encrypted with FairPlay or not, it would be precious information to get better support in xine-lib.

Of course I always accept donations if someone wants to buy me an audiobook so that I can test myself ;) But I’d really prefer to find a simple and quick way around for getting info, without going on first line myself.

Changes can happen if I get a decent continous job, as I’d actually like to start listening to audiobooks to improve my English, but of course the first thing I’d have to do in that case would be to get amaroK handle bookmarks in audibooks :P But right now, I prefer written books, way cheaper :)