Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Seminars while you drive

If I drive longer distances and get bored of listening to the radio I love audio books. Too bad they are usually quite expensive. But i discovered an alternative: Listen to seminars.

A good place to start is the KITP, for example their Blackboard Lunches.

The audio formats they offer are realaudio and ipod. As I do not own one of these white gadgets, I have to use the other option. My car radio can play mp3's (from its USB port or CDs). So I have to convert the .rm files to mp3. Here is how you can do that (so you don't have to spend as much time on it as I did):

In case it is not done already, install mplayer.

When you call it like
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af volume=0,resample=44100:0:1   -ao pcm:waveheader http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/download/bblunch/dine.rm

it will create a file audiodump.wav which in turn you can convert to an mp3 with bladeenc.

After you've done that for a couple of talks, use
mp3burn *mp3
to write the seminars to a CD and you can hit the road, Jack!

Update: Of course you don't use mp3burn as that would produce an ordinary audio CD with maximally 72 Minutes playing time. You want a data disk with the mp3's on it so you really use a program like xroastcd.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haven't seen this one before, excellent resource. Project Gutenberg also has a bunch on public domain works you can listen too.

Anonymous said...

Download free mp3 from googlemp3.com


http://www.googlemp3.com

is a new google site