audiobooks on CD

My Nissan Leaf Forum

Help Support My Nissan Leaf Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Rat

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 25, 2010
Messages
977
Location
Silicon Valley
Nissan doesn't have a good solution for those of us who listen to audiobooks on CD. I've tried ripping the CDs to the USB drive, but they don't play in order there, so that's useless. See the threads in the /Music sub-forum on that. The CD player works fine, although there have been a couple of times when the panel either wouldn't open, or went into a repeating open/close loop. Both times, it cured itself after turning off the car and starting again. The problem is what to do with the plastic case the CDs come in while driving. It can be impossible, or at least dangerous, to try to fish out the next CD from the case while driving, so I want to have the case handy and the next CD out where I can grab it easily. I can leave both on the passenger seat if I don't have a passenger, but that's not entirely satisfactory since I often put other things on that seat (papers, a cap, etc.), which cover the loose CD, and when I pull out the old CD while driving, I generally drop it on the seat, where it has slipped on top of the next CD. I've ended up putting the one I just took out back in. Another problem is that in a sharp turn the CD can slip over the right side of the seat and down under the seat. More than once I've had to pull into a parking lot, get out of the car, go around to the passenger side and open the door, then kneel down to reach it. It's amazing how far down it can go. Another problem is that every time I have a passenger, I have to move the arrangement to the back seat, and if I forget to move them back to the front seat the next time, then the CD ends, I can't reach them without stopping. Sometimes there in the back the CD has wedged itself between the seat and the seat back, again necessitating getting out of the car to retrieve it.

So here's the tip part. If the case is slim enough, I place it in the cup holders, one corner down, and the next CD is slipped in "front", i.e. towards the seats, vertically. I've found I can change CDs without taking my eyes off the road. I toss the "old" one onto the seat and reach to the cup holder area, pick up the next one, and pop it in smoothly. The next time I'm stopped at a light or parked I put away the old one and pull out the next CD and place it in the cup holder. The biggest problem with this arrangement is that many of the books have so many CDs that the case is too thick to fit there, so I have to deal with the problems in paragraph 1.
 
Why wouldn't your files play from the thumb drive? Is it b/c the files are too long in terms of minutes?

I use the drive exclusively, have a bunch of CDs converted to mp3 vbr 192 kb/s average, and all is well with my music. There should be absolutely no difference, other than your "songs" are hour(s) long.
 
ILETRIC said:
Why wouldn't your files play from the thumb drive? Is it b/c the files are too long in terms of minutes?

I use the drive exclusively, have a bunch of CDs converted to mp3 vbr 192 kb/s average, and all is well with my music. There should be absolutely no difference, other than your "songs" are hour(s) long.
Two reasons:
#1: Because the Leaf USB player won't play the tracks in order. It uses short names instead of full track names, or at least that's the current theory to explain its weird behavior with audiobooks, so if you rip the CDs to the USB and the tracks are named "Mystery Track 1", "Mystery Track 2", etc. it only gets the first few characters and all the tracks have the same name to the system so it plays them in random order, no matter what order you copy them in to the USB drive. There's a thread on this in the Music sub-forum. All the attempts to remedy this have failed; you can read about it there. The one thing I haven't tried is to rip everything to my hard drive then write a program to rename all the files with short names in the correct order. Renaming them manually would be too much trouble since some audiobooks have as many as 15 - 20 disks and 20 tracks per disk. I know of one company that always has 99 tracks on every disk. It's not worth the trouble anyway because of reason 2.

#2: I want to have my music on the USB drive and I don't want to have to be swapping USB drives while driving the car. If I am entering traffic where I have to concentrate I switch from the story to music because I can't be paying attention to it. Also, my wife often drives my car and doesn't listen to my audiobook so she switches it. Switching from audiobook (CD drive) to thumb drive is just a push of a button on the dash. The USB port has that obnoxious spring-loaded cover on it and it faces the passenger seat, not the driver, so it's not easy to replace one with another while moving.

The sloped console area right in front of the cupholders is wide enough to hold one CD, so that can be used, too, but the plastic case for the whole audiobook is too big for that. I don't want to put "naked" CDs there because that area sometimes has coins, pens or other hard objects that can scratch the CD. Even the surface of that plastic area might hurt the CD surface, whereas the CD is less likely to be damaged sitting vertically in the cupholder next to its case.
 
A correction is due here. I stated that the Leaf player must use short file names instead of the whole file name. I don't know what file name it uses, but for audiobooks, it orders the tracks by some metadata I can't see. It's not the actual file name, nor what displays on the Leaf touch screen. I ripped a set of CDs so I could listen to the audiobook on USB thumb drive without having to keep changing the CDs. After ripping the tracks, I renamed the long names to short ones showing the correct order (e.g. 601.wma = disk 6 track 1 through 612= disk 6 track 12). Not only would the Leaf player not play them in the right order, but even the Windows Media Player played them in random or at least wrong order (despite having shuffle off). I don't know what the reason is, but the only solution I've found is to use an audio editor to concatenate the files into one long file for each disk.
 
Lectures/books are all I listen to in the Leaf and I use usb sticks. I solved the track order issue by joining all my files into one using MP3 Splitter (despite the name it can join/concatenate too). It's easy to use freeware available from http://www.mp3-joiner.net" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

Works great. Only slight occasional hassle for a clumsy ape like me is if you knock the track up/down switch on the steering wheel, which I have been known to do when using the horn, you have a chore or much boredom to locate the space you were on in that 14 hour track.
 
Since the MP3 player capabilities of the Leaf are wonky, the best solution is to use an app on your smartphone and transmit the audio over Bluetooth or auxiliary. This also avoids the issues with the Leaf auto-playing the files. Audible and Overdrive are the best apps. Audible, of course, requires you to buy the audiobooks, but Overdrive allows you to borrow audiobooks from your local library. Mortplayer is great if you are ripping CDs. Akimbo is another good player.
 
You can get a decent amdroid phone for this function for around $30 to $40 even as low as $14 (grabbed a couple at radio shack)

Virgin mobile units go on sale a lot.

I use smart audiobook player.

Just connect bluetooth media audio to the leaf (yes you can link one as phone and one as media)

Honestly the built in ui is junk I just abandoned it and simply use it as a bluetooth bridge.
 
nerys said:
You can get a decent android phone for this function for around $30 to $40 even as low as $14 (grabbed a couple at radio shack)
That's an interesting idea. I don't have a smart phone, but I won an Android mini tablet called a ProntoTec. I've tried to download library ebooks onto it but the free app I downloaded won't play that format. Apparently it has something to do with the DRM restrictions. I'm sure I could rip CDs to this device, but I don't know if the tracks would play in order on the device. It's very difficult to use and I don't know if it has the right output jacks for allowing Leaf control. Just using the audio output would not work. Even when sitting in my chair at home and not multi-tasking, it takes me several minutes and many tries, often dozens or even scores, to get it to respond to my touch controls. I could not use the ProntoTec controls to stop or pause the audio while driving. When I drive I frequently have to stop the audio for many reasons: traffic requires concentration, too much construction noise, trying to listen to navigation, etc. So my question is whether the Leaf audio system can use the Android audio player, i.e., will the car controls control the Android player software? The ProntoTec has a USB jack but that won't help. The device would just act exactly like the existing flash drive and we already know the Leaf's own player software won't play those in order. So if I connect it with the Aux jack, does 1) that send signals to the player app for Android and control stop/start; 2) does it just treat the android device as a dumb USB drive with the Leaf's player in control; or 3) does the Leaf just act as a set of speakers and the user has to control everything with the android devices own touch controls?

I guess before I explore this, I'd better try ripping an audiobook disk to the ProntoTec and verify that the Android player will play the tracks in order. If it won't, then the whole question is moot.
 
I use my iPhone with bluetooth and it's glorious. However, that doesn't help you.

I had some audiobooks that looked like they were named properly, but on my phone, they played all out of order. What I discovered was that secret meta-data, and the fact that you CAN change the meta data.

If you rip the CDs using iTunes you can edit the meta data on them, and there is something called "tracks" or something, so if you enter the track numbers, it plays in order.

I'm not exactly sure on the meta data, but you can try messing with it.
 
you need to use dedicated audiobook player software such as smart audiobook player it will play the files in chronological order based on file name

if you use an audio music player it will try to play the files based on id3 tag information
 
nerys said:
you need to use dedicated audiobook player software such as smart audiobook player it will play the files in chronological order based on file name
if you use an audio music player it will try to play the files based on id3 tag information
Hmm, I'm not sure what id3 tags look like when CD audiobooks are ripped by a music player. If the id3 tags are deleted, will the music player play by file name? I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to download an id3 tag editor and experiment, but it's an option to try. Thanks for the tip.
 
If you use a dedicated audiobook player you wont have touck with id3 tags

If you want to muck with id3 tags you id3 tag it awesome program and you can do batxh edits such as eliminate all id3 tags all together in seconds forcing the program to use file name ordering.

If you line audio books trust me. It is worth getting dedicated software to listem to them with. I will do a video of what i use in my leaf.
 
ID3 tag stuff.

I'm running Windows 7, I can right click on an mp3 file, select "properties", select the "Details" tab, then click on a field labelled "#" (the pound sign, or if you're young the "hashtag") and you can edit it (I think). I believe that controls the order of play. Give it a try, no extra software required.

Or download iTunes, which is free and can rip CDs for you anyway.
 
I've never heard of a dedicated audiobook player before now and I wouldn't know how to load it into the Leaf system. I don't have or want a smart phone so a phone app would be of no use. I could put the program on the USB stick but I don't think the Leaf would recognize it. It's not like an external hard drive on a computer, or perhaps it is, but the Leaf doesn't have a full-featured computer operating system in there to execute a program. What's needed is a way to take a set of audiobook CDs and rip them in a form that does not have id3 tags directly onto a USB stick. If that's not possible, then second best is a program that takes a the full set of mp3/wma files from the hard drive (could be hundreds in one or more directories) and deletes all the id3 tags in one batch operation. A program that only allows you to edit or delete individual files would be impractical.
 
How about just numbering i.e. renaming each file or chapter or whatever segment it is, and it will play in on perfect order.
 
ILETRIC said:
How about just numbering i.e. renaming each file or chapter or whatever segment it is, and it will play in on perfect order.
No, that doesn't work. There's a long thread on that. That was the first thing I tried, of course. The Leaf player simply doesn't look look at the file name. It plays them in random order when I do that, even when it is NOT in random mode. It may display the file name on the screen, but that's not what it uses when deciding the order to play.
 
ILETRIC said:
Then, I guess, one has to splice the thing into one file.
Done that, too. It works, but it's a heck of a lot of work since there can be dozens or even hundreds of files in a long audiobook. One company puts 99 on every CD. This is something Nissan could easily fix.
 
Back
Top