Why is it, that people are a-fuzzin’ and a-cussin’ over the quality of digital music, but no one says a peep about the abhorrent quality of most online audiobooks. I was just looking through my audiobook library, and all are 24 to 32kbps!
Even with fantastic narrators like Joss Ackland — who does a wonderful Heart of Darkness — all soul is sucked from their voices; and for what? To save bandwidth? Bah, humbug! It’s not as if audiobooks aren’t already insanely expensive as it is, so at least give us the quality we deserve.
Now, I could be wrong, but since I only have audiobooks from Audible and iTS (which is Audible), I’m going to go right ahead and blame Audible for not doing their job properly.
Ultimately, I end up getting stuck on most audiobooks, simply because I can’t deal with having to spend hours on end in 24kbps-land.
My only experience with ‘official’ digital audiobooks (from big publishers rather than indie authors) is Audible, and yes, they’re lousy. It’s not just that they encode at a low bitrate, but they do an incompetent job of it. LAME with the ‘voice’ preset will output a much higher quality sound file than anything I ever got from Audible.
On the other hand, great quality can be found on the dark nets, where you can find nicely-encoded mp3 rips of CD audiobooks, with no DRM. Let’s think about the choice this is presenting the customer.
I think we should just move onto video books, on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs so we can click on certain parts of the video and learn more about whatever it is we click on.