This is one of those unplanned posts that presented itself as I looked for solutions while converting yet-another e-book to an audio book. The book, The Urantia Book, the problem, it's HUGE, over 3000 pages, and coming in at a fraction under 80 hours of audio! Up until then, the largest e-book I'd converted, came in at around 35 hours - and that was a mammoth task to do 'manually'.
Normally, after making the text-body from the e-book 'presentable' (add punctuation, remove Super/Subscripts etc.), I use NaturalReader, running on my Win7 box, to convert it to WAV files, then use the Linux app. Wavbreaker, to first merge these files into one, then split the resultant into same-sized chunks that make for easy listening, each approximately between 1.5 to 2 hours of audio. I used to convert with NaturalReader running a VirtualBox'ed WinXP on Linux, producing 100's of audio books in this way with the setup, until I saw reason - it was way too slow.
Anyway, the problem I was experiencing with Wavbreaker was, unsurprisingly, file-size, and was compounded by the fact that my OS of choice, is of the 32-bit variety. An easy fix, or so I thought, was to use Wavbreaker on my 64-bit Deepin setup to do the deed, only to be disgusted to discover that Wavbreaker was never upgraded to avail of the advantages of 64-bit addresses. Undaunted, I then decided I'd go 'old-school' and merge & split my WAV-files from Deepin's Bash terminal.
And that really pissed me off - the discovery that both 'sox' or 'ffmpeg', run on a modern 64-bit Linux OS, fail miserably to split Wav files that are over 4Gig in size - completely unacceptable in 2022. The TUB text produces a Wav-file that's almost 13Gig.
That's when I went looking for a Windoze alternative and discovered Wavepad - and which is most excellent! It allows me to merge or split huge files in one go, something that was impossible with the crippled Wavbreaker app. The only downside is that in operation, with huge Wav-files, it is rather slow. Since I've only got 8Gig of computer RAM (7.2Gig available for use) and don't have any SSD space left, Wavepad is forced to use my external 6TB USB disk-drive as its cache - so it's no surprise that it's slow.
But onto the point of this post. While getting familiar with Wavepad's capabilities, I came across a large Wav-file that I'd generated years ago, of Wayne Green's blog posts. Who's Wayne Green I hear you ask? - click here for info. I personally came across him around 2008-09, probably as a result of him having been a guest on C2C radio on several occasions. I somehow happened upon his frequently-updated blog, and since I found it quite entertaining, decided to make an audio book of it. This spanned from 2004 up until 2013, when Wayne Green croaked, so it's fairly lengthy, coming in at about 53 hours of audio. I actually emailed Wayne Green back in the day to see if he was interested in using my converted audio-files on his site. I really didn't expect a response, but respond he did, promptly as well, which surprised me, but in the negative, no, he didn't want my audio-files - which surprised me not!
While playing with Wavepad as mentioned above, I was pleased to find that it supported conversion of audio files to the Opus format. It annoys me that most of the Windows apps that I've tried, don't support it, which really is a shame as technically, it's wonderful - royalty-free, with minuscule latency and intelligible audio-encodes at a miserly 6kB/s. I just wish I could find a cheap, dedicated mp3 player that supports it as well. I've used Wavepad to split Wayne Green's blog-audio into 40 Opus pieces, each 1.5 hours in duration & have uploaded them here to my Google Drive, on the off-chance there may be somebody interested in listening to some of them.
I'll finish up with a few comments on Wayne Green himself. First, he was a 'know-it-all', to which he would no doubt have responded, "I know!". With an IQ purported as being over 200, maybe he was, and although his Art Bell C2C spots were entertaining, they get monotonous after a while - he basically used to read a LOT (1-2 books a week) then regurgitate what he'd read on Art's show. Art Bell apparently found it tiring eventually as it stopped being a regular gig, and Wayne moaned continuously about it in his blog, cajoling readers to contact C2C and ask for his return. Never happened. Also, he continuously harped on about 'cold-fusion' being a 'done-deal', both on C2C
and in his blog, yet he never once mentioned trying it out for himself,
despite being a bit of an electronics-wiz. I got the impression that whatever he'd read, became Gospel, the 'real-deal' - at least until he read another book that contradicted that belief...
His other 'obsessions', referred to ad-nauseam throughout his blog, concerned vaccines, schooling, diet and the medical system. He repeatedly relayed how he went out of his way to communicate with a sick Steve Jobs so that he could provide him with a cancer-cure, but failed to break through the wall of 'minders' that surrounded him. To say he was critical of current-day healthcare is an understatement. Yet, despite this vitriolic opinion, when push came to shove towards the end of his life, he ignored all the advice he had offered to others, and instead went with doctor-recommended treatments - then bitched & moaned at their incompetence when things didn't go according to plan (well, he died...). He seemed to have been a 'do as I say, not as I do' type individual.
Lastly, a memory. When Wayne died, there was the expected influx of gushing emails from friends posted on his site. One 'friend' stated his intention to maintain Wayne site as a memorial of sorts, 'for the foreseeable future' - which I thought admirable. What actually happened was that just a few months later, the site was gone! I remember thinking at the time, "With friends like that, who needs enemies."
Anyway, as the above link shows, Wayne Green's site IS still available online, but on the Wayback Machine.
