Software Review: Markable from iPodsoft

SFFaudio Audiobook Software Review

Audiobook Software - MarkAble by iPodsoftMarkAble
Portable media bookmarking software
OS Environment: Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
Manufacturer: iPodsoft
Version: 1.6.0

MarkAble is designed for audiobook listeners who own an Apple iPod, or who use iTunes to listen to such books. Or podcast listeners wanting to be able to combine and bookmark their saved files. Audiobook files bought from the iTunes Music Store or from Audible.com are ‘bookmarking’ – that is, the iPod (or iTunes) remembers the point of the book where you were up to, and resumes from there when you start listening again. This, of course, is vital. However, there are many other sources of audiobooks. Such books may be in a variety of different formats such as MP3 files, or audio CDs or tapes you may have bought. MarkAble makes it easy to merge a large number of tracks or individual files into a few files which will bookmark on your iPod.

So I ask you… all SFFaudio surfers out there, what do you use to bookmark your audiobooks?

Me? I’m a MarkAble man, but I would like to know what everyone else uses for the good of the audio community. So what is MarkAble, I hear you ask?

Well, it’s a little bit of nifty software that allows you to bookmark all your audiobook files so iTunes , and more importantly your iPod, can remember them automatically. I was informed about this piece of software from one of our listeners over at the StarShipSofa podcast. The cost, a mere $15. Well worth the investment to rid oneself of the irritating problem of finding your last position on something so mammoth as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or Haldeman’s Forever War.

So I ask you… for the good of the community… is there something better out there and if there is – we need to know about it. Please post your comment’s below.

CBC Radio One greenlights Science Fiction RADIO DRAMA series

SFFaudio News

CBC Radio OneCBC Radio One audio dramatist Joe Mahoney reports on his blog:

Canadia, the Science Fiction/Comedy pilot I produced with Matt Watts, has been picked up for ten episodes.”

WOOHOO!

It appears that two pilots were made for the show, the second starring Matt Watts (Steve, The First and Steve, The Second) and Donnelly Rhodes (Battlestar Galactica) was the clincher for CBC Radio execs.

Joe sez producing duties on Canadia will be helmed by CBC veteran Greg DeClute. Mahoney will be story editor and series advisor on the show. Joe writes: “I’ve had long talks with both Greg and Matt about how this is going to work and I’ve concluded that the three of us working together should be able to come up with something phenomenal — or at the very least not half bad.” If Canadia‘s quality lives up to that of the extremely popular, non-genre, audio drama Afganada, that is currently airing on CBC Radio One, Canadia will be a appointment radio. Canadia begins airing next month! March 2007!

One should also remember this is pretty cool time at CBC Radio One, if you recall from some stories we posted last year, the mother corp still has the J. Michael Strazcynski series The Adventures Of Apocalypse Al in the can. Hopefully it will be airing by the summer or concurrently with Canadia. We’ll keep you posted as more details about SF on CBC Radio One as it comes in.

Escape Pod has MORE vintage Silverberg!

SFFaudio Online Audio

Escape PodEscape Pod has podcast another vintage (1972) Silverberg novelette. This one is called {Now + n, Now – n}. Another story as old as me!

EP086: {Now + n, Now – n}
By Robert Silverberg; Read by Stephen Eley
1 MP3 File – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Escape Pod
Podcast: February 15th 2007

Silverberg himself says of his novelette:

“A man with the telepathic ability to communicate with himself through time uses his power to play the stock market. Everything goes fine until a woman with a power of her own shows up. The title of this story is printed differently in every publication where I’ve seen it. Sometimes it’s in brackets, sometimes not. In the story, plain parentheses are used.”

Heart Of Darkness analysis from BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time podcast

BBC Radio 4 Podcast In Our TimeIn Our Time is a BBC Radio 4 podcast covering the “big ideas” of our age. Coincidentally, they happen to have Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness as their topic for this week! If you’d like to download the show |MP3|, here’s the description.

“Written in 1899 by Joseph Conrad, Heart Of Darkness is a fascinating fin de siecle critique of colonialism and man’s greed. Conrad draws on his own adventures for the plot. The story’s main narrator is Marlow, a merchant seaman who pilots a steamship upriver in what is largely assumed to be the Belgian Congo. He finds the scramble for Africa well underway, with Europeans desperately competing to make their fortunes from ivory. Marlow’s journey takes him into the interior of this mysterious silent continent. After a dangerous passage he finally arrives at the company’s most remote trading station. It is reigned over by Kurtz, a white man who seems to have become a kind of God figure to the local people. Marlow is fascinated by him, preferring his messianic ravings to the petty treachery and mercenarism of the other white traders. On the journey back, Kurtz dies, whispering ‘the horror, the horror’. The interpretation of these words has perplexed readers ever since and the book has prompted a diverse range of readings from the psychoanalytical, that sees the novella as a metaphor for the journey into the subconscious, to feminist readings that examine how Conrad excludes female characters and focuses on the male consciousness. Conrad wrote; ‘My task is, above all, to make you see’. So did he intend this novella to provoke a discussion of the immorality and rapacity at the centre of colonialism? Was he questioning the hero’s welcome given to those famous explorers who came back from ‘civilising’ Africa, as they saw it? Or was he, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe put it, ‘guilty of preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?'”

Contributors to this week’s show include: Susan Jones, Fellow and Tutor in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Robert Hampson, Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London and Laurence Davies, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Glasgow University and Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.”

Scholarlly inclined listeners can subscribe to the podcast via this feed:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/inourtime/rss.xml

KAMN The Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas on Robert J. Sawyer’s Far Seer

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas LogoRobert J. Sawyer’s first novel in his Quintaglio ascension series, Far Seer, is under scrutiny by The Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas this week. The novel is set on an alien planet populated by intelligent dinosaur-like creatures. The “far seer” of the title refers to a telescope and the story parallels the events surrounding Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter. This is a terrific Science Fiction tale about the practice of science. But don’t take my word for it, listen to the ninjas including the recently returned Joe Murphy (AKA Randy Innuendo). Download the |MP3| or subscribe to the show and get KAMN automatically delivered to your MP3 player:

http://www.kickassmysticninjas.com/shows/feed/

Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

SFFaudio Online Audio

Podcast - Heart Of Darkness by Joseph ConradI’m sure it could be argued, and maybe even successfully, that Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness doesn’t qualify as Horror. But I’ll be damned if I’ll be the one to make that argument! First published in 1902, this novella explores morality and human nature in “darkest” Africa and comes to a deeply noirish conclusion, one I can only describe as true-horror. As a co-production between LoudLit.org and LiteralSystems.org this is quite a fine sounding audiobook, reading duties are split between Tom Franks, providing the narration and David Kirkwood, who performs the story within the story. Check it out and let me know if you agree with me that Heart Of Darkness is Horror.

Heart Of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad; Read by Tom Franks and David Kirkwood
10 MP3 Files – Approx. 4 Hours 15 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcast: LoudLit.org
Podcast: February 2007

Subscribe to the podcast:

http://heartofdarkness.loudlit.org/podcasts/heartofdarkness/itunesfeed.rss

Or download all ten sections of the novella directly:

Section I, Part 1 |MP3|
Section I, Part 2 |MP3|
Section I, Part 3 |MP3|
Section I, Part 4 |MP3|
Section II, Part 1 |MP3|
Section II, Part 2 |MP3|
Section II, Part 3 |MP3|
Section III, Part 1 |MP3|
Section III, Part 2 |MP3|
Section III, Part 3 |MP3|