When Jim Egli was here to visit (if you want to hear the MP3 of the interview Jeff did with him, it is here) he mentioned that he is listening to the bible on his ipod via a podcast of the 1-year bible.
I thought this was cool and a great idea for my commute (I’m running low on free sermons), so I went hunting for it (in the non-itunes form of course, because I’m an avid hater of all that is itunes and media player).
I found this piece of crap first, and thought, well maybe it doesn’t suck too bad, but I was wrong. The reader makes comments about what he is reading, and it has cheesy music, and never changes tone much.
So, I abandon the thought of getting the actual 1-year bible with it’s new and old testament daily readings, and just went looking for audio bibles that are broken into daily chunks.
I found this guy who wanted a form of accountability to help complete the one year bible, so he is putting it online. It sounded cool, but his feed is broken or something, so only the first one is on there. So that bummed me out.
Plus, a lot of these feeds weigh in pretty heavy, at like 18 megs and only go for 20 or 30 minutes. I can encode an hour of sermons into less than that. Seriously, quality isn’t that important for spoken audio people, if you can understand what the person is saying and there is no persistance of annoying artifacts then you are good. I think I can set the bit rate to 32kbits/sec, mono, with a sampling rate of 22.5 KHz and it sounds fine. Anything that sounds sucky is because my laptops power cable bleeds onto the audio input sometimes while I’m recording, not because of the encoding.
So, I figure I’m just going to borrow Glynn’s NIV CD’s, and encode them myself some weekend, and then chunk them together following some 1-year reading plan. I figure that can’t take up too much space on the ipod at 15 megs / hour, and the only time I listen to music anymore on the thing is on really long trips, and when I’m trying to let other people hear stuff that I think is cool.
In other related news, I got an email from the “Free Ipod” websites that I got my ipod from, and they are going to start tossing people who don’t finish getting all their referrals in 90 days. This made me wonder how close I was to finishing a couple of the things I started and it turns out I’m 1 person away from getting a free 30 GB one. So I figured that would be a cool b-day present for