My local library has a reasonable collection of audiobooks - each comes as a CD/DVD set.
I’d like to listen to some of these while driving, but my car has no DVD player. It will accept output from my smartphone.
So my question is: What’s the best way to get audio from a CD/DVD into a file (e.g. MP3) that can be played on a smartphone?
Googling turned up DVD Audio Extractor, which looks like it might do the job - anyone have experience with this?
I’m doing this now for an upcoming road trip. But not to android phone. I’m putting the books on thumb drives. If you have a car new enough to connect to your phone, does it also have USB ports that the stereo can connect too?
I’ve done it two ways. With actual DVD media, I can read the media on a Windows machine and use Windows Media Player to Rip .mp3s of the disk. Then burn that to the thumb drive.
The other way is that my library has an online site where you can download the audio book. The library recommends using a free app called OverDrive to read the ‘downloaded’ book (the downloaded file is really just a pointer to the audio book on line). When you open the downloaded file, OverDrive automatically converts it into .mp3’s and writes it to your computer. I then just write those files to a thumb drive.
Looks like I’ll be able to fit about 6 books on a 16GB thumb drive.
I’ve never seen/heard of audiobooks on DVD before.
I’m well familiar with audiobooks on CDs—both audio CDs and mp3 CDs. For the former, you’d have to use some software to rip the CDs as MP3 (or other format) files that you could transfer to your smartphone. There are plenty of programs that will do this. It’s possible you might have to do some organizing or renaming to get the tracks to play in the correct order once you get them on your phone. For the latter, you’d just directly transfer the files.
Just coming in to mention that this plan may run afoul of copyright. You are not the owner of the audio books, so you likely don’t have the right to transfer them to other media for any reason - even if there is no nefarious intent.
Uh, yeah. I meant CD’s not DVD’s.
I was wondering about the copyright as well. But since the library actual recommends and has links to an application the burns the downloaded file to .mp3’s on your own computer, I suspect it’s not a problem. I guess unless you try to sell it/share it or something.
The library may indeed advertise applications to copy CD’s, but they can’t transfer the right to do so to you:
Caveat transscibor
:shrug: Just talked to the head librarian (office is right across the hall). This person has been there for years.
Anyway, she even said that the application is specifically there for you to use to create .mp3’s. And that if you only listen to a book say on your short drive to and from work, no one would ever be able to get through one in the allotted check out time of 3 weeks.
I very, very, very much they would allow or encourage you to do so unless it was ok. I work for this county government, and our lawyers are very cautious. And very thorough. Must be some loophole.
I have been unable to find a definitive answer to the question of whether format-shifting (e.g. ripping your own CDs so you can listen to them on your smartphone) is currently technically legal in the U.S. or not. But “everybody” does it.
I would imagine that if you ripped CDs that you checked out from the library and deleted the files when you returned the CDs that this would fall into the same category, both legally and ethically, as ripping CDs that you own; but I do not know for sure.
The article that you linked to doesn’t want me to read it without registering, but it seems to be mainly warning people that they’re not allowed to make copies of library media to keep.
One of the problems you’ll run into when ripping a digital book to mp3 is how it’s read. your media player may read file 1, then 11, then 111 in that order. I’ve had to renumber my play list starting with 1001 so it all reads in proper order. Also, on a side note, my car will read CD mp3’s using the song Title in order of play but the USB port will read the Name in order of play.
Unfortunately I lost my free batch file renumbering software so it would be a PITA to rip anything now.
I use a program call CDex to convert cd audiobooks to mp3 format (some are already mp3 format and you can just copy and paste). To keep the folders in proper playing order, I just use a preceding zero, ie 01,02, 03 etc. That also works.