Solved: MP3 player for audio books

[rbrager]

I am a mall walker. I frequently go walking at our local mall for exercise. My incentive to keep going is to listen to audio books formatted as MP3 files. Does anyone know of a MP3 player that remembers where it stops and can resume playing at that spot even though I turned off the machine a couple of days ago?

Currently I am using a Trio machine with a flash memory card. I can manually restart if I remember the file number. It would be great if I could load the entire novel and let the player deal with the restarts.

 

[Courtneyc]

Now you know why Ipods (any version) are so popular. They can do exactly what you want.

Courtney

 

[rbrager]

Thankyou courtneyC. I'm a just a cheapskate and I'm looking for an alternate solution. Kim Komando mention one during her show, but it was an unfamiliar name so I didn't remember it.

 

[stantley]

I have a SanDisk Sansa player that works well, it'll start up the same place you were when you powered down.

You can get the Sansa Clip for about $35 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855125040

You might find it at a local store and save on shipping or wait until Newegg offers it with free shipping.

 

[RootbeaR]

Creative Zen, for a fraction of the price of an iPod. Also gets radio and can record radio or voice.

 

[rbrager]

Thanks All,

I now have a somewhat hard to operate Sandisk Sana Clip MP3 player with FM Radio. It seems that this little device has lots of capabilities but with a steep learning curve.

 

[stantley]

It shouldn't be too hard to learn how to use it, if you have any questions let me know.

There's some information here: http://www.sandisk.com/sansa/#/support-0/

And a lot of good info here: http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board?board.id=clip

 

[rbrager]

So far I've discovered that the Clip absolutely requires a USB 2 connection. I can double click on the ICON in MY Computer. I can load an entire audio book if I first creatively rename the files to keep the list in order. The Clip control does not understand folders (directories structures). How do downloaded audio books ork?

 

[stantley]

Well, I have a lot of experience using Mp3 music files but only minimal experience working with audio books. Can you give me a link of where you download these files so I can see what they look like.

You're right the player doesn't look at folder structure, it reads the Artist, Album and Track tags, so I would think you could control the order by how they are tagged.

 

[rbrager]

Actually thy are Rips of CDs from My library of audio books. I use a tool to extract the .da files to .wav files. Then I use music match to convert them to .mp3 files. So far I haven't joined a service yet. I ve heard good words about audible but I still want to listen to my Harry Potter stuff, as well as others.

 

[stantley]

About how many files are there for one book? Are they broken down by chapter? How are you currently tagging them?

 

[rbrager]

There are up to 25 files per CD and usually 4 to 19 CDs per book. They are usuall not organized by chapter. I don't tag them. I put them in a directory structure.

d:\My audio books\<author>\<book title>V1 ... Vn\<track num> - track title.mp3

The Clip uses the ID3 tag in the file. with hundreds of files for a book ist would be impossible to edit the internal file tag. As My ripper EZCDDAX lets me choose name information so I can be a bit creative an ceate a scheme to use on the clip

 

[stantley]

Most tag editors will let you update the tag data from the filename. Since you have Musicmatch see if you can edit a track and do 'Tag from Filename', but you might need Musicmatch Jukebox Plus to do that.

Or you can get Mp3Tag, a freeware tag editor. Then do Convert > Filename - Tag. You can edit the files you have now, but going forward you could just use the ripper to tag the files when you rip them.