Sian Mountbatten wrote: > I received a DVD from Amazon which came with a slip of paper saying > Download 1 FREE AUDIOBOOK > I went to the site, signed up for 30 days free membership, selected > a book and downloaded two files of type .aa. I noticed that the only > software available was for Windoze or MacOS.
To paraphrase Rule 59 "Free advice is seldom cheap." here would be to say "Free downloads are seldom cheap." Or perhaps the slip of paper and a free download is worth the recycle value of the slip of paper. Fortunately it didn't cost you any money to find out that it wasn't really free. > So is there a package which will play an audiobook. A search with > apt-cache gives yatm, but, after installing it, I tried it one of > the files and it merely produced horrible sounds. Certainly nothing > intelligible. The "free" download file format you have is not a generic audiobook and is not a free format. It is a nonfree format file. It is an AudibleAir proprietary file format. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible.com Specifically this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible.com#Device_support And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible.com#Digital_rights_management As far as I know there are no free(dom) programs available to play the audible aa file format. And also annoying is that the format won't play on a lot of digital audio players. (I can't say most since Android and iPhones both apparently will play aa files and together they now have the majority of all players in existence.) It won't play on any DAP that I own for example. There are many proprietary programs available to play and transcode them to something that may be played. But at that point you are throwing good money after bad. Better to stop while you are ahead and go elsewhere. > So are audiobooks only for Windoze or MacOS? Has anybody any suggestions? There are many audiobooks from other sources. However Audible.com has been reported to have a 95% share of the audiobook market. That is huge, a near monopoly, and all of it is using the nonfree proprietary format that is inaccessible to free(dom) software users. Bob
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