garym;504663 Wrote: > I agree with jimbo's comments in general, but of course we're talking > about audio books here, not music. I don't want DRM product either, but > we also don't need "lossless" audio books. Very low bitrates are > transparent when it comes to the spoken word.
I completely agree that lossless audio books sound like overkill. While lossy may be a good argument for music - audiobooks are darn long even with modern storage options I'd rather keep them more manageable. However, in terms of transparency have you ever listened to Audible content? I'm not very picky; most MP3s I listen to at typical bitrates (192+, even a lot of 128, etc) don't bother me. But up to format #4 (32Kb/s) which they touted as great until recently; Audible is nowhere near transparent. I haven't tried the newer Ehanced format (64Kb/s) enough to make real comparisons; it sounded better in quick tests but I wasn't immediately convinced that it was good enough to beat ripping CDs. Yes even with 32Kb/s the speech is completely understandable but there are very perceptible differences between it and audiobooks on CD. Some audiobooks have music fade-ins on chapters or other noises and all of it sounds slightly unnatural. I guess kind of like listening to a lot of radio stations. They sound pretty good, maybe even fine, but you don't mistake them for a CD. Anyway I certainly don't prefer DRM; but I'm not passionate enough about it to deal in absolutes, so I do own some Audible content and some audiobook CDs. But I don't understand objecting to Squeezeboxes doing more rather than less. Do you complain that so many portable MP3 players do support Audible? To each his own. -Jeff -- jdoering ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jdoering's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17482 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=73651 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
