Friday, October 19, 2012

Listening to Books On CD while Quilting

In the studio I am listening to The Madonna Of Excelsior by Zakes Mda.  Excellent book.  Zakes Mda is a novelist and playwright from South Africa.  In 1971 the rural town of Excelsior was the site of a scandalous breach in the apartheid Immorality Act, which forbade sexual congress between races.  The black women involved were jailed and the white men released on bail.  Ultimately, the charges were dropped by the authorities, but for one of the accused women, Niki, life's hardships were only intensified.  This is the story of one family weathering the storm from early 1970s oppression to the present day mixed society of South Africa.

The voice of the narrator Robin Miles is beautiful.  It lilts through the accent.  And it should, she is a professor of speech and dialects at SUNY.

I am on the very last CD, and I am missing the book already.  I always hate for a good book to end.
Stupid MP3 Player
See my cute pjs?

Blocks I won at River City
I will use black between the rows
to set them apart
This weekend I need to get working on getting some quilts quilted.  While at the library for the meeting last night, I picked up two more books on CD to quilt by.  The librarian told me I could download the books to my computer.  Then save them to a file.  Then upload them to my MP3 player and thus have the entire book on the device.

My particular MP3 player does not upload, for some reason, from Overdrive (the program used by the library to disseminate ebooks and voice books).  I have an audio book waiting to download from the library at this moment, so I may play around with it tonight to see if I can get it on my MP3

My wonderful Bose Unit
holding my spray starch
The problem is that I cannot hear it when it is on the Bose player and my quilting machine is humming in my head so close to my ears.  I cannot get it loud enough.  Hmm.

Dilemma.  When I sew in the studio, I have to turn the Bose up loudly so I can hear it.  It is doable with out a problem, however.  DiNozzo sits on his window seat and sleeps through it.  I used to put the Bose in the window seat but you know how that went.  Frank won the Bose player when he was at a sales meeting for his company.  They had a contest and of course he won, he is a really good salesman and people just like him.  He gave it to me when he got home

(working on downloading the book to the MP3)

Try as I might I could not get the MP3 to accept the download.  So tomorrow I will try to download it directly from the computer.

The computer says it is downloading, and the MP3 says it is receiving but they are speaking two languages and it doesn't get on to my player.

Darn, I really wanted to listen to books when I was quilting.    I need another plan.

glen






2 comments:

  1. Mmmm sounds like you need another mp3 player!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have a fancy and expensive I pod touch and even that doesn't download the overdrive books either. I have tried everything. I end up getting the cd's and put them on the computer (iTunes in my case) and then sync to the iPod. This seems to work. I sooooo get the need to have stuff on the player. I'm a huge podcast fan - have you ever gotten into those? There is a whole quilting podcast community out there waiting for you:-)
    If you never have, I suggest 1) quilting for the rest of us. 2) American patchwork and quilting podcast
    3) crafty garden mom 4) quilter in the gap

    Google them, you won't be sorry

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