the less impressed I am overall. They’re terribly, terribly irritating and fuck with my OCD (though I realize that’s my problem and nothing more) and suck my time up when I try to remedy the OCD-fuckage and I’ve decided I’m won’t have any more of it. In fact, I returned an audio book to the library a couple weeks ago without even burning it to my hard drive. It looked fairly interesting and I’m sure I would have enjoyed it – the story was called “The Alchemist’s Daughter” and yes, you guessed it…had to do with an alchemist’s daughter learning the tricks of her da’s trade and traveling to London and becoming a part of the alchemy community there.
Then there’s annoying and puzzling things like this. “Magic Kingdom for Sale” or “The Painted Veil” – which book is really on this CD? This kind of thing makes me crazy.
- The Magic Kingdom’s Painted Veil For Sale
So why did I return the book?
Honestly, you’ll think me bonkers at the very least…but I returned it because there was absolutely no consistency in the disc/track information and that’s what fucks with my OCD and sucks up my time. If it had been a five or six CD set, I mightn’t have returned it so quickly. But there were eleven discs and each disc and attendant tracks popped up differently in iTunes. Some discs had the author and the book title in the information section, some had the narrator information only. Some discs had tracks labeled as disc number-track number. Others had only the track number. Probably if I had not just gone through the same exercise with another couple of large audio books, I would have been a little bit more forgiving with this one.
Conforming most of the information on the discs is easy as pie; it’s the actual track names/information that wears me out. Going through each one to conform the title information so when it’s synced to one’s iPod (and if one remembers to then sort the playlist by track name), the story will flow logically is tedious at best, a royal pain the ass at worst. Why can’t whoever’s pressing the discs or however they’re created make sure all the information is the same for the entire set? Is it that difficult to do? How about some conformity with the track names? Where’s the quality control, people?
I’d much rather download audiobooks from iTunes or audible.com because it’s much cleaner and easier, but it’s not an option right now. Pity, that – have you seen how many Kate Reading-narrated works audible.com has available? Good Lord, there’s a ton of ‘em and if I could, I’d buy them all. Speaking of Kate Reading (who comes up as a topic for discussion – or at least a mention – every time I talk about audio books), I suspect if she’d narrated the book I returned to the library in a pique of feverish twitching, I would have slaved over the track names. But it wasn’t so I didn’t.
Luckily, my walking schedule has been so severely curtailed with the time change and my recent bout of Something Viral This Way Comes, so it’s not like I’ve got nothing to listen to on my walks. I did walk last Sunday and listened to some of “V for Vendetta” (very enjoyable, as I knew it would be – the narrator has a very similar accent to one I’ve heard from Caroline John in her audio book works), since I have no new Kate Reading . Well, I’ve started relistening to “Bellwether” on my lunch hour, because I don’t have to pay close attention to it because I already know the story and by lunch time, I need a break from music for a little while.
I’ve got two words for the audio book industry, though it might well be a moot point these days, with books also available via the aforementioned iTunes and audible.com.
Quality control.
Me? I’ll probably stick with the audio books I’ve already fixed and listen to them as time allows and when walking season starts up again, keep my fingers crossed there’s a little extra cash at the end of the week for iTunes or audible.com and Kate.
(I’ve had this draft post lying around now for about three weeks – it’s been in the queue as a post title only for all that time, but the record is the Agatha Christie post I started back in August, which is also just a post title.)
Related posts:
- Today’s update on my scraped knee
- “Blue and Gold Print”
- Down for the damn weekend
- Brain dump for Tuesday
- The Albizia theme
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I don’t think the audio book publishers submit their info to CDDB. If the correct information for an audio book happens to show up correctly in iTunes, I think it’s because some kind listener took the time to upload the correct information. I’m pretty sure that when CDDB sees an unknown disc, it tries to match number & length of tracks with something it knows, which is why it suggested the two audio books it did.
Pity you missed-out on “The Alchemist’s Daughter” – it works extremely well as an audio book. The narrator is excellent. It’s about a young woman who was raised by her logical & scientific-minded father. She has no experience interacting with people other than her father, so she’s completely unprepared when a young man shows up & she finds herself falling in love with him. I think it’s a good examination of the challenges faced by a person (especially a woman) who lacks social skills – and the internal struggles she experiences as she tries to make sense of it all.
Wow – I can’t believe I used “correct” three times in the same sentence!
Yeah, I was sorry to be that annoyed with the whole enterprise at the time I got to “The Alchemist’s Daughter,” but it’d be one I’d investigate on iTunes at some point.
At least you didn’t use “saunter” three times in the same sentence – the morning radio host I listen to from Los Angeles did that one morning and I almost ripped the radio from the wall to throw it through the window. That was the beginning of the end of me listening to him, though I haven’t quite made the break just yet…