Audio-Book Smack Down!

Ok, so many of you know – or may not know – since April, I’ve been working for a Library IT dept.  And the other day I thought I’d try one of the library’s audio book download services from home.  It sounds really cool on the face of it.  I could be blasting away ‘roids in EVE while a book plays in the background on my stereo – Very Cool!  Well, if it were that simple, everybody would be doing it! LOL!

Actually it DOES work really well after you get things set-up.  It’s the getting set up that can be a huge pain in the ass!  What actually prompted this whole adventure into new territory was that I was trying to help a patron get an audio book transferred over to their MP3 Player.  After fiddling around trying this, and trying that, and doing all the neat little tip-n-tricks I was finding via Google for over half and hour, we both threw up our hands in unbelief at how difficult this problem was proving to be. The patron agreed to let me take their MP3 player home for the evening to continue my trouble-shooting quest.

What I found were hoop after hoop after hoop of processes to go through in order to get DRM files to properly transfer their playability rights – I now thouroughly despise DRM. I think it really stands for Disgustingly Repugnant Masochism or something like that. I eventually had to re-image the MP3 player back to its original, pristene “out-of-the-box” settings in order to get things back to some semblance of working order.

Eventually I got it all to work, after a fashion. It really wouldn’t be too bad to do this, except there weren’t any instructions anywhere that I could find on how to get things set up and in what order things had to be done and how. So I was just fumbling around in the dark the whole time trying to figure it out from various “try this” or “try that” tid-bits I found through many Google searches until I finally hit on a combination that worked. Then I tried it all again to make sure my newly found procedure worked and was repeatable. Then I wrote up a 2-page(!) “how-to” document for our staff so that they could assist patrons with this nightmare process – one page to get the book downloaded to the PC, and another page to move the book from the PC to the MP3 player – OY!

Oh Well, Hope y’all have a super holiday weekend, Enjoy!


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