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melons and audiobooks
This must have been a good year for canteloupe / muskmelon - type things. For the last three days I have been enjoying wonderful locally grown melons for dessert. They must like hot dry weather, or something!
Another thing I've been enjoying lately is listening to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey / Maturin novels. Blackstone Audiobooks has a guy named Simon Vance reading them.
Four years ago I complained about audiobook readers doing the voices, but it must depend on the reader, because this guy is actually really good. Since I read much faster than I listen, I find myself noticing more subtle things this time than I did when I chain-read them as text.
The NYPL doesn't have all of them available for download, so I got some of the CD sets from the local library system. This poses more of a problem than I realized, since each CD is composed of multiple tracks, and yet all CDs have the same album title. I've had to fudge when ripping them by giving each CD a sequential album title and then putting all the "albums" into a sequential playlist. It's not pretty, but I think it'll work.
Another potential issue is that the CDs are not all from Blackstone with Vance reading them. Some are from Borders / Recorded Books Unabridged, read by someone named Patrick Tull, which may or may not be OK, since I haven't listened to his version of how the characters sound, yet. I'll let you know.
Update (8/9/07)
According to this review, Tull will be just fine. Vance did a wonderful job on the way home from work today, doing Stephen pretending to ask the Cacafuego's boat if they would come see the pretend plague, or at least send a surgeon to look at it. It was laugh-out-loud funny.
Vance must read faster than Tull, as his versions seem to be almost half as many discs.
Here are profiles of Vance, Tull, Guidall, and the dreaded Paul Michael.
Another annoyance with ripping CDs compared with simply downloading audio books is the skipping tracks. I can't seem to rip Post Captain track 10 of disc 9, no matter what I do!
Update (8/10/07)
As I am still 8/10 in the queue for Post Captain at NYPL and the FLLS copy is unbelievably trashed (many dead tracks on several CDs), and because I'm already halfway through part 9 of 12 in Master and Commander, I broke down and used one of my free Audible.com books (that came with the MP3 player) to download Vance's version of Post Captain. So I guess you'll just have to wait for a while to hear my opinion of Tull's reading...
The other CD sets from FLLS (LoM and 13GS) are much newer - so much so that I actually had to enter the CD information in by hand because it wasn't in the online Gracenote database!)
Update (2/28/08)
I prefer Vance's version, possibly because I'm just more used to it.
Posted by origamifreak at 8:55 pm |
