Downloadable audiobooks with decent sound quality?

I tried audible.com and their stuff sounds like crap. It's encoded at 32 kbps and they don't even run it through a low pass filter to remove the high frequency hash. It's painful to listen to.

Anyone know of a service that is more competent with how they encode their files?

Audio Books For Free . com perhaps? I am not thrilled with the quality, even at the highest level, but it is certainly listenable. (This is from the nutcase that ripped CD versions of his audiobooks at the same encoding quality as his music...)

Well them I'm a nutcase too.

Thanks for the link but I'm really looking for a commercial service that has copyrighted material.

You might want to try out the iTunes selection of audible.com books. Although they come from audible.com, they are compressed differently (32kbps AAC rather than MP3). I tried listening to the preview of The Last Juror on both audible.com's website and the iTunes Music Store and the version on iTunes sounded much warmer. I'm not sure that'd be the case for the entire selection of audiobooks on iTunes, though. Plus, you have to have an iPod to listen. The ol' burn-n-rip technique for converting the iTunes AACs to MP3s would be a big pain with an audiobook.

- trs

Wow, you're right. The Audible content through iTunes sounds much better then what Audible offers through their own service.

You know I have been itching for an excuse to buy an iPod...

Ring ring, Doug... You listening to this?

While we are on the subject, are there any caveats to iTunes?

Their tunes are in AAC, which pretty much means your stuck with an iPod for playing them on the go unless you want to lose quality by transcoding.