Dan Bachelder bought the MP3 audiobook for Little Brother and decided that he’d rather listen to it in single-chapter chunks, delivered on a regular basis like a podcast. So he hacked up his own personal podcast, using free software to slice it up and serve it right into his podcatcher.
Best of all, he’s made the slicer-file available for others who’ve bought the audiobook and want to cut it into chapter-sized chunks.
bought the audio book (and hard cover) version of Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother. It’s delivered as a 163 megabyte MP3 file, over 11 hours of spoken word… I have listened to dozens of audio books delivered as podcasts, but I only have one “normal” audio book (The Areas Of My Expertise by John Hodgman… hilarious) which I bought through iTunes, it is broken into 3 (2.5 hour) parts, which is still a bit long for an “episode”. I really prefer the podcast episode per chapter form factor because it caters to my various neurosises and gives me a feeling of progress and accomplishment even when I don’t really deserve said feeling.
I listen to my podcasts in three places, my iPhone, my Apple TV, and through iTunes on my MacBook Pro (Holy fanboy, Batman). While the synchronization between the three is pretty good, it can mess up and lose my place in an audio file. This usually isn’t an issue because I rarely need more than a sitting to complete any particular file. I suspect that I’m not going to finish an 11+ hour audio book in a sitting… or even 11… so there is bound to be frustration and cursing as I lose my place repeatedly somewhere in the syncing madness.
After some Googling, I found AudioSlicer. In under 30 minutes I had the book split into 26 named sections, intro, chapters 1-21, epilogue, afterword, bibliography, and credits and copyrights. Here is my .split file (unzip it) which you can use with AudioSlicer to split the MP3 you purchase into the same chapters (if you have a mac). When you “Export Splitted” make sure “Filename Format” is “[trackNumber]_[title]_[album]_[artist]”.
