I’ve received a couple of interesting responses to recent iPodBlog entries and now seems as good a time as any to address them (translation: Please, Apple, for the love of god, release something new! ).
More on audiobooks
In response to Convert audiobooks to Audiobooks, Keith Gugliotto wrote:
I read your article on creating Audiobooks for the iPod this morning and noted our application for Mac OS X, Audiobook Builder, was not mentioned. It’s very easy to use, includes features not available in other offerings for the Mac, and it’s quite affordable at only US $9.95.
Keith was kind enough to send me a license for Audiobook Builder and it works as advertised. He’s right. It’s easy to use — far easier than building audiobooks by hand. Thumbs up from me.
On this same audiobooks subject, a reader or two pointed out that, with the help of a couple of useful AppleScripts, you can join disparate tracks and then turn them into an audiobook. Those scripts — Join Together and Make Bookmarkable — are from the fertile mind of Doug Adams, proprieter of Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. If you’re a Mac user who’d like to roll your own audiobooks without a lot of mess, these scripts are another way to go about it.
Vista, Parallels, and audio
Over on the Macworld side of things, a recent article, Hands On: Running Vista Home on a Mac, and its observation that playing music via Windows Media Player (WMP) on Vista Home Edition running under Parallels Desktop for Mac was awful, prompted a reader who wishes to remain anonymous to pen:
But what about QuickTime and iTunes?
To which I reply, “It’s less awful.”
On my 2.66GHz Mac Pro, the MWP/Vista/Parallels combo-platter resulted in unlistenable audio — lots of stuttering and slowed tempos. iTunes and QuickTime audio playback, on the other hand, wasn’t too bad. I still heard the occasional stutter, but if the computer wasn’t overtaxed with other chores (and something as simple as launching a Windows application counts as “overtaxed” in this regard) music stuttered only rarely.
Browse reactions to Vista from those who know and, presumably, like, Microsoft’s operating system, and you’ll find that even those running Vista on living and breathing PCs find much about it difficult to swallow. Mac users should therefore not feel singled out that parts of it run poorly under virtualization.