Is the time you spend copying discs, and speeding up files worth it? And then is the space worth storing them for the long term? Or do you listen and dump them?
Put it this way on the time factor - I easily make up the marginal time I spend loading the discs and hitting rip. I probably could make this even just by digitizing alone because having all the discs in one folder makes the transition from disc to disc seamless when I listen. Imagine having to stop what I'm doing to change out the disc, that could cut some serious production, whereas my ripping is usually done while I'm doing something else. It does take time, but I think it's worth it. Then if I compress the time down by speeding up the files, that's not even close. I select a folder, it loads up, I select a destination (usually same title but in a FAST folder), click the stopwatch icon and leave the room to do whatever I'm doing. All this happens mostly while I'm busy with other things. The time consuming part is putting files onto the microSD or the player's flash memory, but even this is done during my recreation time (and I'm probably listening to another audio book while I do it, ha ha). The average book I listen to is probably about 9 discs. If you figure an hour each the math would look like this:
Player has 1.2x without pitch preserve. I just cut the listening time from 9 hours to 7 hours 30 minutes (9/1.2). There's no way I spent an hour and a half doing any of the above.
With the new software, I will typically compress to 1.6x (I can go faster, but I guarantee that I can keep up at this speed)
The book now takes 5 hours 38 minutes to listen to.
That additional step just cut my listening time 26% or an additional 2 hours, and I have normal pitch of the reader. It's certainly worth it for most books (there might be a book where going fast is a disadvantage)
On my computer while working in my home office, I'm usually listening using VLC at 2x which is exactly halving the time, if I need to pause to write something down, I can do it (I can't always do this while listening and multitasking away from the office - which means I have to try and remember certain details for later recall)
I will normally make sure to take a list of key things from the book and turn them into questions and then input them into Anki (a freeware version of SuperMemo) .... this way a lot less is lost to forgetting. This last part may or may not be worth the time - that's debatable, but I sure remember a whole lot more from the books I read.
Most books I keep, but I ripped them at 64bps in the first place which keeps their size fairly low. I have a bit of room on that particular HDD (and my external). Some of these I will never listen to again, and some I will. When I decide I'll clean up the folder.
Did I mention that I already started a collection of good audio books for PokerCub?
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