[Christianb]

Hi Gang,

Here's what I'd like to do, copy multi-cd audiobooks into one long, mono, low-quality MP3 file. However, I seem to have problems getting that to work using CDex. Seeing how CDex hasn't been updated for years I'm thinking that CD makers have found some way to distort their audio so it won't come out using CDex. Even when I choose extract to wav files using CDex I wind up with a n minutes long silent WAV file. What I have often had to resort to is using Audacity recording What-You-Hear, Saving that into a wav and then using WinLame to compress the result. Does anyone have an easier option. I really, really want to keep it in Mp3 format, because I like to share health-related audio books with my friends and WMA and OGG just aren't as good for that. I also think Mono is a reasonable requirement, when listening to books on tape there's just no need for stereo people almost never talk at once and even if they do I don't need seperate sounds in each ear.

Thanks,
Christian Blackburn

[jmmijo]

I've never used CDex so I can't help you there, sorry

However I have used the Creative Labs WAV tools app that comes with my Audigy and X-Fi cards, it works great and I do beleive it has an option to convert the stereo WAV into a mono type as well

Also I do beleiver Goldwave will also allow you to do this, both the ripping and the WAV conversion as well.

[Christianb]

Hi jmmijo,

Thank you very much for your reply. I did figure out my problem. CDex has a bug whereby if you select "NEC" as the drive type, but have an NEC DVD drive (not sure which drives are affected by this actually, but my ND-3520A is) the audio ripping is completely silent. However, once you choose "Generic" everything works as expected. I thought I was dealing with some new form of copy protection, but it looks like it was a basic incompatiblity. This does make me miss my plextor a little since they have great software, but Plextor's usually (in my experience, 2 drives) have hardware that is unreliable.

So in summary if you want to get a multi-cd audio book (book on tape) converted you can:
1. Use CDex to create wav files
2. Use Wavecat to combine all the wav files
3. Use WinLame to convert the one large wav file to a mono, vbr, 32kbps (or lower) MP3.

All the programs I mentioned are completely free. I don't think WaveCat is open source though. It's too bad too it's a little cludgy.

The problem with CreativeLab's bundled MP3 encoding software (last I tried it) is it doesn't support low bit rate MP3s. You don't need a lot of fidelity for human voice, it's just wasted space. 32kbps or even 16kbsp vs. the typical 128kbps for music is just fine with audiobooks.

Cheers,
Christian Blackburn

[jmmijo]

I just looked at the Creative Audio Converter app that came with my X-Fi card, you can resample .WAV and .MP3 files down to mono and 32bit sampling

Now of course I have not checked out the Audigy 1 or 2 apps but I would imagine it has some of the same feature set too...

Back on topic, glad to read that you got things resolved too