burn, burn, burn

So this last weekend I had a few things on my to do list, one of which was burning and ripping some audio books.

I listen to audio books when I'm walking.  I find music difficult to walk to as you naturally want to fall in to step with it and of course each song has its own tempo.  Well, unless you listen to dance music I guess, as loads of songs are at exactly the same tempo.

I use audible, which is owned by amazon.  It's all done digitally - you download the audio books and they have their own player thing.  Their player is actually terrible, but I don't generally use it.

What I generally do is burn them to CD (I've discussed this before - you're only allowed to burn them once) and then rip the CD and stick those on a tiny MP3 player I have (a Sanso clip).  Ripping the CD means I have to deal with iplayer, since audible uses its own proprietary format.  It's a necessary evil and generally seems to work okay.

Anyway, the to do list only featured ripping and burning as one of the things I had planned.  It was a grand prix weekend, and one of the ones the beeb was showing in full, so that would obviously take up a big chunk of time, but I hadn't expected that doing the audio books would take quite as long as it did.

The problem was I'd stacked up more audio books that usual and also the books I'd purchased were mostly quite long.  So while burning each Cd only takes about 5-10 minutes, when you're doing 30 of the things you're talking 2.5 hours at the minimum.

Ripping the things is quicker, but it comes with a kind of admin burden.  The reason for this is I just use windows media player to do it and it doesn't really recognise the tracks.  That means you have to go through and re-name everything.

I don't do this to the extent I could - I just rename the files and folders, rather than editing the Meta data, but still, it's horribly tedious.  And it's horribly tedious on top of the whole ripping process, which is tedious too.

There are associated tasks too, like downloading the audio books, backing the files up, putting them on the MP3 player, etc, so all told I'd say I spent a total of around 7 hours doing all the stuff that I needed to just to rip the audio books.

When you consider that the total time for the Grand Prix adds up to 6 hours (1.5 + 1.5 + 1 + 2) it's not really surprising I didn't get much else done at the weekend!