David Poulson

I have many of the items already from various kickstarters, but I don't recall Practical Mending eBook by Kate Downham. I have a big ole pile of jeans in the basement, and I know enough about mending to get the job done, but perhaps there is some practicality I am missing that would motivate me to get the job done in a hurry?

Pontus Duckert wrote:One thing I'm curious about. When I have one big file I tend to forget where I was (especially if it's unintentionally interrupted) and have to manually search for it. To you who prefers one big file, does your device remember, do you write it down? How do you keep track of that?

Fancy players, and phones, tablets, and the like, have bookmarking where you can mark many places in the audio file. Some players at least remember where your last position when you shut off the power. Others, sadly, require you to hold down on the FastForward button forever and ever, and ever to get through a long file. This is also the case for "unintentional interrupt[ion]," e.g. battery ran down or a button got whacked when a tree branch catches your player.

Paul, yes, thank you for asking. Audible/Amazon would never be so kind as to ask my opinion!

I can see the appeal of a single file if you have a Audible-approved player with bookmarking, but, if you are not playing on your phone or one of the few non-phone players that support the AAC codec and bookmarking, old school mp3 chapters are the way to go. I don't keep my phone on my person, so old school it is.

paul wheaton wrote:I think that what we will do is have two offers (one for each format) and each will have the ability to upgrade to the other for $3.  

Does "upgrade" mean the default is a single m4b file and a zip of 35 mp3s is the upgrade, or do you mean we have our choice and if we want both formats, then that is an "upgrade?"

mp3's zipped up, one file per chapter, leading zero chapter number and title: "01 Title of the Chapter."

Don't choke down on the bitrate or sampling rate any more than the Permies podcast. I wrote a script to speed up podcasts to 1.75 X, and I play them on an old, small mp3 player without any extra features or bulk. I get some robotic warbling on the audio with the 16 kHz sampling rate @ 32 kb/s of the Permies podcast, but it's acceptable for trade off of smaller file size. m4a/ACC has a better compression resulting in a smaller file size, but it excludes lots of older players, so then you have to mess around with transcoding (format conversion). Good Permies should be holding on to their old tech as long as possible, so there are probably many old players that only play mp3, or maybe WMA, but don't go there! Also, please steer clear of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection.