Audio Module Speaks Volumes

“It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” Garrison Keillor said, and off we were, to that mythical place in Minnesota “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.

The difference, however, was that Keillor’s monologue wasn’t coming through my radio, but rather a Handspring Visor. This is thanks to the Audible Advisor, a new, $130 Springboard module for the Visor from Utah-based CardAccess and Audible.com, an East Coast marketer of voice recordings.

The module plays back recordings that users download from Audible’s Web site, which offers fiction and nonfiction books, NPR programs, periodicals and newspapers (the Los Angeles Times offers a daily 36-minute audio digest of its national edition). Prices of the selections vary. Keillor’s 20-minute monologue, for example, is 95 cents. Books are priced competitively with standard audio book recordings on CD or tape.

The Audible Advisor holds 16 megabytes of audio files, which translates to about 4 1/2 hours of sound. The sound quality ranges from good to excellent. “Lake Wobegon,” excerpted from a live radio program, had a tinny sound, while an interview of filmmaker George Lucas by actor Robin Williams had the sound of a program recorded in a professional studio.

The Audible Advisor draws its power from the Handspring’s batteries and claims up to 30 hours of playback from two AAA batteries. Included is a program to move sound files from PC to hand-held.

The process of selecting and downloading audio files is relatively straightforward. You choose a file, download it to your computer and place the Audible device and Handspring Visor on its synchronizing cradle. The files transfer quickly--two or three seconds for 20 minutes of audio.

In many ways, this is the spoken-word equivalent of the SoundsGood music player that came on the market last year. It operates in the same fashion and the on-screen controls for audio playback look similar.

The unit comes with stereo headphones and can be connected to a cassette adapter for playback through a car stereo system.

If the price seems daunting, users can get the Audible Advisor for $49.95 when they subscribe for one year to BasicListener, a service that allows users to download recordings for $12.95 a month. The service offers more than 3,500 titles and a subscription to one of the more than 25 audio versions of newspapers, magazines, radio programs and original programs.

More information is available at https://www.audibleadvisor.com. For those seeking a wider range of content for their daily commute, it’s worth investigating.

Mark A. Kellner is editor at large for Government Computer News and hosts “Mark Kellner on Computers” at https://www.adrenalineradio.com from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursdays.