Flutterby™! : Audibly Annoying 2009-07-06 16:31:52.648738+00

Audibly Annoying

2009-07-06 16:31:52.648738+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Ever since hearing Barack Obama say "there are white folks, and then there are dumb motherfuckers like you", I've wanted to listen to Dreams from My Father. We drove down to Fresno this weekend, so on Friday I went looking for a version I could download on to my MP3 player.

All the web searches led to various domain names which were all spammer resellers for Audible.com. I've avoided downloading crap from Audible, but the pages promised me MP3, so I went through with the purchase, which then told me I needed to download and install their download manager. Did that, which did a long download (for which I had to decide up-front which device it was for), and then told me my MP3 player was incompatible.

Left an irate feedback on customer service, got a call back shortly, in which the nice man walked me through how to get it working (involved using IE and a sequence of unplugs and replugs) and waited for the download to complete, but...

Is there an alternative to Audible.com that just gives me straight MP3 downloads without any lousy-ass buggy iTunes clone (well, of course its buggy, that's part of what makes it an iTunes clone)? I'd like more spoken word audio for long car trips, but I don't like paying extra for all the annoying DRM crap.

Oddly, I was listening to that driving up to your place the last time I was in town. I've found Amazon to work well - but only for titles they carry. If it's not on Amazon, I just find it on a Torrent. I wish the recording industry would figure out a way to make amends with file sharing. It's a wonderful way to find stuff that isn't carried through normal channels.

Is it available on iTunes? Couldn't you play it off your iPhone? I know iTunes sucks - but it sucks less when you turn off the frontal lobe and use Apple hardware with it.

Yeah, there's a whole set of business models that depend not on bringing the customer value, but on restricting the options of the customer. Be it iTunes or Audible.com I'd like to find ways to route around that sort of attitude. Unfortunately, as you point out the usual way to do that is to bypass the legitimate commerce portion of the transaction entirely.

And my Sansa Clip got there and back without needing a recharge. Granted, the iPhones sat on the chargers for a good portion of the there and back because they needed it, but it was nice to not have to have one more thing that had to be plugged in to two places.