Monday, January 14, 2008

Sculpting Background Noise

I can't work in silence, it drives me crazy to not have any background noise when I'm sculpting. Sometimes I sculpt to music but being a former percussionist and singer I either start tapping out the beat or singing along (or both). Sometimes a movie or tv works when it's something I've seen lots of times or a documentary since those often can be just listened to, I don't have cable so that's basically the few hours a week PBS has Nature and Nova on. So recently I've started using audiobooks.

For a long time I resisted, I'm an avid reader so I've always felt that audiobooks are cheating. I still have that nagging feeling from time to time. The big problem with audiobooks is that I can't really afford to buy lots of them. So I've been looking around online for places where I can download audiobooks legally. Here's a few places I like. There are also some podcasts that I like but I'll save those for another post.

Librivox - Audiobooks in the public domain. Lots of classic literature here. I just finished downloading a bunch of Coleridge's poetry. I'm not generally a poetry person but Coleridge I absolutely love.

Telltale Weekly - Some are free and some books are for sale dirt cheap. They've got the first 3 chapters of Bulfinch's Mythology up so far, can't wait for them to get the rest done.

Audiobooks for Free

Project Gutenberg Audiobooks - Most of the human read books here are from either Librivox or Audiobooks for Free but they also have a large selection of computer read audiobooks if you can handle listening to it (I can't).

BBC Radio - Not really audiobooks, they have lots of radio documentaries and other shows (seriously if you haven't listened to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radioshows you must). I especially like their science programs. Some are available for download as MP3 but most are .ram streaming audio so you'll need a player that can play them. I recommend Real Alternative package for Media Player Classic which is free and doesn't have ads or play havoc with your registry like RealPlayer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi there, you might want to check out earideas ... lots & lots of good stuff to listen to there (& it's brought to you by some of the people behind librivox).

Unknown said...

Very cool! Thanks.