Slicing Up Cory Doctorow's Little Brother
I 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]“.
Now I could just import these files as a playlist in iTunes, but that's not how I roll… I want everything to be a podcast. Here is the iTunes friendly RSS based podcast feed i created (you'll need to follow the rest of the steps to make that useful, you can't just click that link and subscribe).
Now, take the mp3 files you created, and the podcast feed, and put them in a directory named “lb”… now put that lb directory in “/Library/WebServer/Documents/”. If you have web sharing enabled (System Preferences -> Sharing -> Web Sharing) you should now go to iTunes (or whatever) and go to Advanced -> Subscribe to podcast and paste in “http://localhost/lb/little_brother.xml”
Once the downloads are complete you should have something that looks like this:
All the files are served up locally and should not be available on the network at-large. Once all the chapters are downloaded into iTunes (or whatever) you can delete the lb directory and disable your web sharing (if you don't need it for other stuff, obviously).
I hope this is helpful to someone besides me… if anyone finds an easy way to split the file up on Linux or Windows, let me know.