Audible – On shopping & Cancelling subscriptions

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There is little time one can find to read books these days. Talk about information overflow and pollution, or just the reality of the digital age – one has to really work hard to find time to sit down with a book and enjoy the company of words. I was introduced to Audio books just about when podcasting was taking off or may be when I bought my first iPod and saw this menu listing called Audio books (I am not sure which!). Audible wasn’t actually my primary source of audio books when I started out, however their Science Frontiers initiative which brought out some of the best Sci-fi classics ever, instantly made me a customer. Together with the sweet free book offer using the TWiT referral I had been

I’m about to temporarily deactivate/cancel my Audible account and wanted to use up my remaining credits since they expire once you cancel the subscription. I’ve picked up Lucifer’s Hammer which I read long time back and would love to listen to an audio version. The Lost Fleet: Victorious is the last book in the Lost Fleet series and I’m really looking forward to see how Black Jack handles the politics and aliens! in this finale. Avenger is more of an impulse buy (damn Forsyth!), really looking forward to The Hidden Brain which is all about “How our unconscious Minds elects Presidents, Control markets, wage wars and save our lives” – if that doesn’t get one interested then what will?

On cancelling an Audible Account I’ve previously cancelled my Audible account when I was held up by other priorities in life and did not have the time to do justice to my Audible subscription, it was just a matter of going to the account page and canceling my billing account. Audible allows cancellation of their accounts over the internet only once, if you’ve already canceled your account before and have reactivated it again you can no longer go the online way for cancellation of your subscription. I’ve seen quite a number of posts describing what an ordeal the whole process could be, which involves contacting Audible customer support and getting them to close your account. My experience with Audible Customer support was has been very good. I emailed them regarding cancellation of my subscription they emailed be back suggesting some other options ( like every customer service should!) and I actually liked one of their suggestions and took it. They were happy about it and offered me a small discount (a gesture of goodwill) for being a trusted Audible customer for over 3 years now! So if you do a search for Audible account cancellations and come up with blog posts drenched in negativity… I’ve just got to say that I feel sorry for their experience and your’s might be good like mine ;-)

Ps: If you did take the time to read through the complete post you might have noted the prevalent use of “I”, well this post is based solely on my experience! you have been warned.

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Streaming Movie audio over airport express

One of the greatest strong points of Apple is that they make stuff that kindles people’s interest, so much that users try to improve the products on their own. Airport express is one such product that allows you to stream audio wireless from iTunes to any set of speakers attached to the airport express audio port. Now one would be thinking what if they could allow me to stream other audio content from my Mac via airport express independent of iTunes? well enter Airfoil. Your wish has just been granted. Airfoil allows you to stream audio from the entire system or from specific applications to the airport express unit. However the only disadvantage that i could mention is that it does not support video!! because of the lag in the audio synching between the system and the airport express unit which would be irritating while watching video. A work around that i use makes use of airfoil and the VLC media player.Basically I route my system or VLC audio via airfoil and then set up the audio desynchronisation function on VLC to compensate the delay in the audio buffering time.This option can be found under the preferences>audio section where one has to enter and negative integer to desync or resync the audio and video.You have to play around with the value here which i believe would differ from system to system.I use a desync of -3350 to get a perfect synch between the video played on VLC and the audio streaming via airport express. I am not aware of such a desync function in other media players, but am interested to know ;-)

UPDATE:

 I just noticed that Airfoil has been updated and solved much of the troubles that you had to go through to play videos! (atleast on the Mac) Check it out.

The mac version of Airfoil now comes with a built-in Airfoil video player (see below!) that takes care of audio sync while playing videos so Mac users enjoy, Windows users you can make use of the above mentioned work around for streaming movie audio.

Airfoil Video Player for Mac

Airfoil Video Player for Mac