Solved: MP3 player for audio books

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.

 

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

Courtney

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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.