Just curious since all the people who come here to SRG are radio people, which means you like getting information through sound (not just reading the printed word.) : Do many of you also listen to books on CD a lot? Or audiobooks you download from your local libraries or a commercial site you pay to access? For the record, I am a big audiobook fan. Have even bought a few Playaway books to give as gifts because they are the “next generation” of audiobooks for people (like me) who aren’t patient with complicated technologies. If you are an audiobook person, what sort of titles do you listen to? Are you listening more now than a few years ago? Or less? Why? Like I said, I’m just curious about the crossover between Internet radio listeners and audiobook fans.
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My father was blind, so I grew up listening to him listening to “talking books”. Originally they were on LP records, and later on cassette tapes (this is the 1960s). I haven’t gotten in the habit of listening to books – my sense is they are most popular with people who have a long commute where the speed is not a big factor. When the cassette tapes came out, the player had a special feature that allowed you to speed up the playback, and it lowered the pitch to match the increased playback speed – so it sounded “normal”, but faster. Your mind can pretty easily adjust to hearing speech played back at 2x normal (your brain can process the sound much faster than your vocal system can create it)… with practice you can still have reasonably good comprehension at 3 or 4x normal speed. Windows Media Player has that same capability, but it’s kind of hidden :) If you have recorded MP3 speaking material, you can significantly cut the playback time. It doesn’t work well for music, though. Back when I was using Replay Radio, I used the faster playback, and skipped commercials. It took about 14 minutes to listen to an hour – less if I skipped the parts where Rush would beat the same topic into the ground for 20 minutes :)
Audiobooks are extremely popular with people with long commutes. However, I worked out of the house for years and was still a big fan. I found that for serious books, I needed to actually read the text for good comprehension. But for murder mysteries and spy thrillers listening worked fine. (It’s like watching a movie in your head. In fact, some of the best writers of this genre have backgrounds as scriptwriters for movies.) As I look back, I think I got hooked on the audiobooks as tv deteriorated greatly. And I also noticed when I skipped tv at night and listened to books instead, the evening hours seemed more tranquil and productive (You can’t do much else when you watch tv but you can do all sorts of other things while you are listening to books on CD.)
On the woman problem thing: I don’t listen to Rush much at all because of what you mentioned — it takes him forever to get to the point. And he rarely has guests. And I don’t care about football or other sports so that chitchat bores me.
Is the Replay Radio you refer to the machine C. Crane used to sell?
No, Replay Radio was a software program that let you record shows using your PC – it creates MP3 files that you can download into an MP3 player or play on your computer. The program has gotten a bit bloated – it is now called Replay A/V, indicating it also will record video. But since it was created, the streaming companies have gotten more and more aggressive at making it not possible to play the stream without using the player for the station. That means the sound card has to be dedicated to recording a single stream – it can’t record more than one stream at a time, and it creates more complications. 21 minutes of commercials (and news/weather/traffic) embedded in the recording apparently isn’t enough to justify the cost of doing the streaming…. they need your eyeballs looking at video ads