How To Get LibriVox's Audio Files on MS Windows
Okay! You've found LibriVox; welcome. And you're staring at the catalog page, wondering what you do to get the files from wherever they are out there in the Internet ether onto your PC. This guide will tell you how. In fact, it will tell you several methods for how. Let's get started.
On the main Catalog page, pick one of the lists of Completed works. Once you're on that page, look through the list until you find something that interests you. Then click that title to take you to the page for that work, where you will see a variety of links to the audio files.
For the sake of something specific to talk about, this guide will use Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey as an example.
Now that you're looking at the page for Northanger Abbey, notice down the left-hand side of the page there's a section labeled "mp3 and ogg files", with a bulleted item for each chapter. Each bulleted item contains links to three files: a 64 Kbps MP3 file, a 128 Kbps MP3 file, and an Ogg Vorbis file (this guide doesn't explain the difference between these). Once you've picked which type of file you want, here's how to download it, from the server computer where it is stored, to your PC.
The All-purpose, One-at-a-time Method
Position your mouse pointer over the link for the file type you want.
Click the right mouse button; a menu will appear near the mouse pointer.
One of the options in this menu will be something like "Save Target As ..." or "Save Link As ...". Click that option.
The "Save As" dialog box will open. Use it to navigate to the folder / directory on your PC where you want to save the file you are about to download. Now click the Save button.
This initiates the downloading process, and the file will download to your PC. How long this will take depends on the size of the file and the speed of your connection to the Internet. The range is a few minutes to more than an hour.
This is the basic procedure: right-click on the link of the file you want, then save that file. But look, there are 31 files for Northanger Abbey, and some works have many more files than that. What a pain to have to do this over and over to get the entire novel.
There are (at least) two alternatives.
Zip Archive File of the Whole Work
One alternative is to use the link labeled "Zipfile of the entire book" (in 64 Kbps MP3 format), which is just below the summary of the book near the top of the page. If your connection to the Internet is reliable and stable, this will work. But if your connect is otherwise, particularly if you connect via a telephone modem, you may want to consider the second alternative.
After this archive file has finished downloading to your PC, you'll need a tool to unzip it (which means to extract out all the individual files stored inside it). Fortunately, if your version of Windows is XP, this tool is built into Windows Explorer, so all you'll have to do is double-click on the file, which for Northanger Abbey is named northanger_abbey_librivox_64kb_mp3.zip, and follow the directions for extracting the 31 individual MP3 files. Once they are extracted, you may delete the Zip file.
Subscribe in iTunes
You can download an entire book using the "subscribe in iTunes" feature on all our catalog pages. To do that:
Click on the “subscribe in iTunes” link from the catalog page
This will launch itunes (say “yes” if your computer asks), and import the whole book into iTunes
Once in iTunes, on the left sidebar, click on “Podcasts” (under “Library”).
Under podcasts, you should see: “LibriVox: book-title-by-author-name”
Click on the little black triangle beside that
Now you should see all the files. if they are in light gray, it means they are not downloaded yet
If you see a small gray “Get all” button, press that. otherwise, press “get” on all the files individually
Let iTunes work away at downloading till all the files are in dark gray
To listen, double-click a track as usual.
If you have to interrupt your listening, you will find that iTunes remembers the place where you left off, when you get back to the track (even if you've listened to another track in your library in the meantime).
Browser "Firefox" and the DownThemAll! Plugin
Firefox is a relatively new browser which is highly recommended. One of the extensions (a plug-in) for it is DownThemAll!, which is a download manager. It can handle downloading all the files you want from a particular page in one operation. How convenient.
The DownThemAll! Web site contains a link for automatically adding this extension to Firefox after you have installed that browser. And it contains illustrated How-to's for using it.
One hint specific to LibriVox is for the "Make your selection dialog" (used to pick a set of links from a page for downloading). Near the bottom of this dialog is an editable pull-down list labeled "Additional filters:". One of the pre-defined filters is for limiting the files to be downloaded to those with the filename extension ".mp3". However, LibriVox offers two different resolutions of MP3 files, so, unless you wish to download both versions, you will need to use the "Additional filter:" to specify how DownThemAll! will distinguish between the two. If you want the 64 Kbps files, then enter this as the filter:
/(64kb\.mp3)$/
But use this filter for the 128 Kbps files:
/([^_][^6][^4][^k][^b]\.mp3)$/
And, for the Ogg Vorbis files, use:
/(\.ogg)$/
For either case, make certain to check the box at the right-hand end of the filters pull-down; the box is labeled "Reg. Exp."
But I'm at the library and the right-mouse button is disabled.
Yes, it is quite a nuisance that some libraries find it necessary to prevent use of the right mouse button on PCs for security reasons.
At one library, the following method was found to work around this limitation. This assumes you have some way to copy the file you will download from the library's computer, such as to your own USB device.
Clicking with the left mouse button on the link to an MP3 file caused the browser (MS Internet Explorer) to start the program Windows Media Player, which soon started playing the audio file. With Windows Media Player still playing the file, the Player's file menu was opened and the "Save As ..." option selected. Navigating to the attached USB device and clicking the "Save" button caused the file to downloaded to the USB device.
Not as elegant as using DownThemAll!, but if your library has a T1 line to the Internet and your other option is a phone modem at home, the savings in downloading time can be substantial.
Browser "Opera" and the Link-Panel. (Similar to Firefox's DownThemAll)
Opera has a neat feature build-in. You can let the side-panel display a sorted list of the Web links of a page. Visit your books catalogue page and let Opera link panel sort and display to you a list of all links pointing to the 64k-mp3 files. Then right-click and "save" or "fast save". Then watch the progress of the transfers in the transfer-panel or page.
(Sorry for the large Screenies. I don't know how to link with Thumbnails in this Wiki)
