Telltale Weekly Audiobooks Now Offered as AAC

Alex writes "My audiobook project Telltale Weekly now offers DRM-free AAC downloads of its entire catalog of audiobooks in addition to already-supported Ogg Vorbis and MP3. Probably one of the most-requested features since we started. We also released our first booklength work last month, meaning that an unabridged reading of War of the Worlds will be free online in 5 years or sooner."

Re:5 years seems like a long time..

[Joe Tennies]

You need to look at his site and see his business model. It's currently released and costs $8 (at least for th Ogg Vorbis version).

After a couple years, he will release it to the public domain (or some other free license).

Serious question

[martinX]

Do you know why people were requesting AAC in particular? It's not like iTunes and iPods can't play MP3s. Seems like an odd request. That is all.

Re:Serious question

[Kulic]

I would assume people want to use AAC instead of MP3 because you get higher quality sound out for the same bitrate.

Personally I think it's all very subjective and heavily dependent on where and how you're listening to stuff, but people like what they like.

Re:Serious question

[xanderwilson]

AFAIK that's the whole of it.

Re:Serious question

[geoffspear]

The sound quality difference may be important to audiophiles who are listening to music, but I can't really see any reason why anyone would care when it comes to audio books.

Re:Serious question

[colanut]

Good quality at a lower bit rate. As a result, more content fits in the same space.

But the quality is subjective. 96k MP3 sound fine on my little player while walking and biking. I can fit more in the small usb key than if they were 128s or 160s. If the new format had the same quality at an even smaller bit rate, even better.

Re:Serious question

[System.out.println()]

If I had to guess, they probably wanted AAC's bookmarking ability.

Resume Play from Last Location

[nuxx]

Do these audiobooks have the same 'feature' as iTunes / Audible.com audio books, whereas if you stop playing them and go to listen to something else, they start up where you left off?

If so, can I ask how you make files do that? I'd love to set a number of DJ mixes / live sets to do this, but I haven't had much luck in figuring out how.

Thanks!

Re:Resume Play from Last Location

[BensonLeung]

if those files are AAC files, I believe that all you need to do to change it over to the book behavior is rename the file to the extension .m4b and reimport it into iTunes. That is the iTunes Music Store audiobook format, and it treats it as such based on the file extension. There may be something along those lines for mp3s as well...

Re:Resume Play from Last Location

[nuxx]

I'll give this a try once I'm back home at my Mac... Going MP3 -> AAC is trivial, so hopefully this is all there is to it.

cant you read books on your ipod ?

[johnjones]

I would like to read books on my ipod screen I know that news readers but where are the poem and so on

www. [ipodessentials.co.uk]

where going to do this

regards

John Jones