On Friday, 2013-08-23 at 12:24 -0700, John Andersen wrote:
Note: I've had two ebook providers die/go out of business on me, and once I buy a book (and I always buy them, authors need money too), they all go through this process.
Same thing happened to me with audiobooks. But in this case the site, WeRead4You.com was delivering clean non-drm audio files and the only things I lost were things I hadn't downloaded and saved my own copies of after listening. I was using them because I was fed up with Audible.com drm. (I paid Audible a lot over 13 years and 500-600 titles so far. I'm done being thanked for that by being treated like a thief.) Now I use Ambling Books mostly. Also drm-free. But since Audible still has by far the largest library, I still get stuff from Audible once in a while. For those, there are a few different ways to strip the drm, but they all suck because it's not really stripping the drm but playing and re-recording, which means loss on top of loss. Some methods suck more than others though. I have not managed to get the necessary parts to work on linux though. It requires the audible desktop windows software and an old activex library they once offered and have been trying to hide and pretend never existed ever since, and a particularly good windows audio converter app called dbpoweramp and a particular mp3-writer plugin, Helix from Real networks. When you have all that, you can convert at about 400x speed on a reasonable cpu (not 400%, 400x!) and it can use multiple threads, and that's 400x _per cpu core_, it even gains 10% to 20% using all threads of a hyperthreaded cpu. It does 70x to 90x speed even on a lowly atom netbook with a lowly 5300 rpm 1.8" hard drive and 1G ram. And it's geared for batch operations and has nice windows explorer integration so you can right click on files and convert them and edit the id3 tags and add cover art, edit the same id3 tag the same way on an entire batch of files, etc. Most other audible.com drm removers just play at 1:1 speed. It takes 36 hours to convert a 36 hour book! I saw one just now that proudly brags that it runs at 5x speed. WOW! 5x!!!! http://swankandswill.blogspot.com/2010/07/audiblecom-without-drm.html -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org