Using An MP3 Player to Play the Lectures from the CD
Will the lectures play on an audio CD? If not, can I download
audio CD copies of the lectures and burn my own CD?
The sound files for the lectures are in MP3 format. It's possible to convert them to a format that can be burned onto a standard audio CD, and I have no problem with you doing that as long as it's for your own use. I don't know what tools to use or how to do it but I believe they are around in abundance. However, keep in mind that there are 15 hours of lectures on the CD, so doing this conversion and burning the CDs could be onerous. I would suggest instead using an MP3 player, as in:
A user writes:
I recently purchased the Philips expanium player (www.expanium.philips.com). This is a
box that plays audio CDs and MP3s encoded on a CDFS. I just plugged in the new
Hands on Java; it works fine. The only downer is that the poor player scans the
entire file system before playing anything; it takes 2.75 minutes for the device
to boot up and start playing tracks. I have cut my own MP3 disk (100 files in 10
directories); they take about a minute to boot.
When scanning, the player builds a table of all directories containing
audio. These dirs are called "albums"; they are sorted by the
dirname. Files in each album are sorted by their filename. I don't
know if the dirname is a fully-qualified name or the local directory
entry name.
Since you cleverly padded out one-digit dirnames and filenames with a
leading "0", the player finds and plays stuff in the right order. Very
cool. The appendix comes first, but it's easy to skip to the
appropriate album on the player. The only thing you can't do
(because of player UI limitations) is fast-forward within a particular
section.
I don't know if you knew about such devices when cutting the CD. In
any case, I am mightily impressed. This is fine craftmanship. It
means that people can do the portable audio thing with this course
without messing with any downloads or CDR/CDRW burns at all.
The Expanium is $200 and is available at Circuit City. I've heard
there are other devices out there, but I haven't played with
them. Hopefully, other player designers will have the sense to sort
the names in a similar fashion.
I certainly knew about MP3 players when I built the CD, but I did not know
that you would be able to play the CD without burning a special version yourself
(although it does appear to make it more convenient if you do so). I also was
unaware of sorting issues -- I created the names the way I did to make it easier
for me to list them during development and testing.
I did hope that it would be convenient for people to use the CD with an MP3
player, which is also why the handouts were provided in PDF format. I did not
know it would work quite this well, however.
Later, the same user (who is clearly into MP3) wrote:
I recently purchased a RioVolt, SonicBlue's CD MP3 player. It is a
substantial improvement over the Philips player:
- A small alphanumeric display that will show the title of each track.
Long titles will repeatedly scroll around. The display has EL backlighting.
- When playing MP3 disks, the player buffers the data into its
internal RAM and stops spinning the CD for minutes at a time. This
saves power and wear-and-tear on the unit.
- SonicBlue has firmware updates available on their website. To
download the upgrade, you cut a CDR or CDRW with the new firmware in a
well-known filename.
- It also plays HoJ out of the box. From spin-up to first words is
about 30 seconds.
AFAICT, the only thing that's better about the Expanium is that
album/directory navigation is a bit easier: it always displays both
the Album number and the track being played within that album. The Rio
didn't originally have a "skip by album" function, but they added it
in the last firmware. (Unfortunately, you do have to take the
initiative to find the firmware and cut the CD -- fun for some, but
maybe not fun for all.)
