Weird? My iPod seems to suck its battery dry in record time when I listen to .m4b audiobooks. Seems to work as usual with music. Any idea what the problem could be? I'm not talking about a few minutes off, talking 3 hours battery running time, meaning those books gobble it up faster than video playback. Help?
hummm, last question, are you doing something more... active. exercise, movement, ect. while listening to the book, over the music? because the only reasion I could think it is eating the batt more, is because the internal harddrive is running more. which the larger ipods have some trouble with when used in active activities. which is why they recomend (or atleast they should) the nano or shuffle for sport/exercise use. it's sd based memory chips are not effected by movement, and do not adversly effect the battery usage.
It could be that the files are larger and the iPod has to access them directly instead of storing them in the buffer.
They're big. Usually between 200 and 500 megs. Now that buffering thing could be an explanation. Is the 'pod really so stupid?
^ But what would keep it from loading chunks Gotta go and test this theory. To the file splitter, Robin!
If the audio books have a variable bitrate, that's going to use a ton of processing power, which will eat through your battery like a fat man through cake.
How loud do you have to play it? Louder for quiet talking books? That would have an effect. I assume the buffer thing is the same as pressing 'next' on the click wheel - that apparently takes up more battery power than just letting the song go to the next one.
The ipod will buffer as much as it can... doesn't read directly from the hard disk even if the file is too large. However it also has the ability to remember where you were on a track. This means every time you turn the thing on, its spinning to fill the entire buffer immediately. With a regular song you are only grabbing a few MB off the disk, and by default regular songs aren't flagged to recall your last location when you power off, so the ipod doesn't start to grab stuff into its buffer until you play something. Tracking through isn't any better than having your place saved, as the thing immediately starts to gather buffer and play any time you stop somewhere, so when you are tracking back and forth looking for your position, the thing is doing a lot of work. If you have a really old ipod it is dumber about how well it works with large files. Newer large capacity versions (and video versions especially) are a lot more graceful about how they use the disk when dealing with large files.
I have two audiobooks on my iPod, both downloaded illegally and both Harry Potter books. The first one (OOTP) is nearly a day long and the second one (HBP) is divided into dozens of 4-8 minute segments (Chapter 1A, 1B, etc.). The one that's divided up has always been a lot easier on my iPod. Given all this talk about "the iPod can only buffer so much at a time," I suggest splitting up your audiobooks using music editing software.
You might want to run audiobooks through a converter before putting them on your ipod - there's usually no reason for them to be stereo, for one, and they also don't need to be encoded with more than 64kbit/sec. I don't see how a normal book can take up anywhere near 500mb, unless it's all three parts of LOTR together. -edit- you could also look for a decent splitter.
I, personally, doubt that splitting up the file will do you much good. Let us assume that it fills the entire buffer at once. Now, let us assume that, much like most buffering protocols, it has a high watermark and a low watermark. That means that it'll only add to the buffer once the low watermark is reached, meaning the buffer is almost empty. This will not only make playing the file less processor-intensive, but you'll be doing far less seeking on the hard drive as well. It'll stop filling the buffer when the high watermark is reached. On a local medium, that can be pretty darn close to full. Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, if you hit the end of file, it would, to improve performance, presumably start simply buffering the next file in the playlist. So by splitting it up, you're not really changing the amount of buffering at all. In fact, you're then going to have to also spin the drive to sort of look up the file in the first place, especially since separate files are far more likely to be stored...well...less sequentially than files already are. In other words, there might be more activity if you split up the files! This is all theory on my side - there's tons of different ways to do this. I think Zenow's on the right track - convert it to a constant bitrate of 64-96 kb/s mono. Far less processor-intensive, drive-intensive, buffer-intensive, etc., etc.
I'm making the .m4b from various sources, and they are in 64bit. Not mono tho. Usually, I take lots of MP3 files, merge them and then convert. For FOUNDATION AND EARTH, my last conversion, that makes 317 megs for 18 hours. To everybody else: thanks for your tips, I'll try some of them. Or go the simple route and use my Creative Zen Touch for audiobooks. The only advantage of m4b is bookmarkability anyway, and the iPod very often just resets them to zero for no reason so that is a mixed blessing at best. It's a hassle to search for where you were in 16+ hour books
Well, with music it exceeds the advertised playing time. This is a very particular thing. By the way, I seem to have found what caused it. It empties that fast when I fast forward within the book. It plays much longer when it picks up where it stopped. Sadly it's sometimes reset to 0.00.00 for no reason
Yeah... tracking around is bad... causes a lot of disk use, and purges/refills the buffer every time you stop... even worse if you are actually holding down the FF button (rather than scrolling to a new location with the wheel) because then it is continuously repositioning.
