audible burning

I discovered a little problem with audible and itunes the other week.

Basically, I like to listen to audio books while I'm walking.  I found music difficult to walk to as the tempo mismatch was disruptive.  The best audio books to listen to are autobiographies and non-fiction, as they tend to be in the form of little stories and you don't have a big plot to follow.

Anyway, I use audible, which is run by amazon.  The prices are really good (you get a book a month for your subscription, which is only about £7 and they're constantly running special offers.  Also, it operates entirely through download, which is nice and convenient.

When I first started using it I did have some issues.  Firstly, they have their own proprietary format, so most programs can't use it.  secondly, the manager software that allows you to play the files is horribly flaky.  It actually looks really naff - like a "my first application" thing you'd put together when learning C++ - and has poor functionality and constantly crashed.

But also, although they allow you to burn a copy of the audio book to CD, you can only do so via itunes.  I hate itunes with a passion, so this is horrible, but also you can only burn a copy of the book once.  SO if it goes wrong, you can't simply retry it.

I do understand this, as they need to be careful with pirating, etc, but there should be a simpler mechanism for redoing it if it fucks up.

Fucks up like it did a while ago.

What I tend to do is take advantage of the offers and buy a chunk of audio books at one time.  I also stack these up with my cheap subscription book and then burn and rip them all at once (you burn them as a standard audio CD, so you can then rip them to your heart's content!) and I did that last weekend (which, given how much other stuff I was doing, I'm not sure).

Anyway, I burned the CDs in one go on Saturday and then went to rip them all on Sunday.. and discovered some of them were totally silent.  Initially I thought maybe I'd turned the volume down, but no, it turned out there was nothing but 80 minutes of silence on each CD.

After some quick investigating I discovered that this is a know problem with itunes 10.5 and audible "format 4" files and the "solution" was to use another format (format 3, which is slightly poorer quality). Initially I was worried because of the issue of only being able to burn them once, but I guess that applies to each format, or maybe they've lifted it temporarily while they fix the problem.

It was actually on the audible site I found out about the issue, but they've not actually announced it, so I Wonder how many people have been affected?

What was also weird about it was that it was random - some of the books all of the CDs had burned fine, some none of them had burned at all and others it was just one or two of the CDs.

All very weird and obviously it cost me money in the sense that blank CDs aren't free and I wasted quite a bit of time, but now I know for future reference at least.