2 ms·

A few months ago I decided on a whim that I should download and de-drm my Audible audiobooks. I have a lot of them from a decade+ of monthly credits being used.

A few months ago I decided on a whim that I should download and de-drm my Audible audiobooks. I have a lot of them from a decade+ of monthly credits being used. I hadn't really considered how much space it would take up so I just set off the download process and did other stuff. 650 audiobooks took up nearly 2TB of space before I stopped it, only noticing when my Mac gave me a warning about not having enough space left on the drive. Whoops. (Audible keeps track of your total listening time... It adds up to over 9 months solid. Crazy, but I can think of worse ways to spend that time.) Anyways, if 6 million ebooks takes up 31TB, I wonder how much space the equivalent amount of audiobooks would use? And how much space a decent library of movies has? I'm kinda thinking that guy on reddit who somehow got a hold of a used Netflix edge server was on to something.

getcrunk 4y ago
the only way i could get that number to work is : 650 books x 15hrs x 3600 seconds x 320kbit/s divided by 8 bits/byte = 1.4tb id say change the audio format and cut the bit-rate roughly in half. but welcome to data hoarding, start with a 8tb external wd dirve!
- russellbeattie 4y ago
  Hmm... well, I do tend to try to maximize the amount of listening I get per credit, so I have lots of 20+ hour books. Stephen Fry's reading of the complete works of Sherlock Holmes is nearly 63 hours [1] and that's just a "single" audiobook (and highly recommended). Lots of Great Courses recordings are similar. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is 57 hours, etc. Also, there's a ton of metadata like images and PDFs, though I'm not sure how much that takes up. And in fact (just checking again) I'm at only 638 books, so it was probably more like 625 books when I did this. Apparently it adds up. 1. https://www.audible.com/pd/Sherlock-Holmes-Audiobook/B06WLMWF2S https://www.audible.com/pd/Sherlock-Holmes-Audiobook/B06WLMW...
- summm 4y ago
  Audiobooks are usually mono, so 700 kbit/s for uncompressed CD quality. To me parent's numbers sounds like uncompressed. I suspect something went wrong with de-drm/decoding. Should be more like 48 kbit/s for basically transparent mono voice with opus. At this rate, 9 solid months will fit into 142 GB...
  - russellbeattie 4y ago
    Whatever OpenAudible.org's default options are obviously aren't as efficient.

getcrunk 4y ago

the only way i could get that number to work is : 650 books x 15hrs x 3600 seconds x 320kbit/s divided by 8 bits/byte = 1.4tb id say change the audio format and cut the bit-rate roughly in half. but welcome to data hoarding, start with a 8tb external wd dirve!

russellbeattie 4y ago
Hmm... well, I do tend to try to maximize the amount of listening I get per credit, so I have lots of 20+ hour books. Stephen Fry's reading of the complete works of Sherlock Holmes is nearly 63 hours [1] and that's just a "single" audiobook (and highly recommended). Lots of Great Courses recordings are similar. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is 57 hours, etc. Also, there's a ton of metadata like images and PDFs, though I'm not sure how much that takes up. And in fact (just checking again) I'm at only 638 books, so it was probably more like 625 books when I did this. Apparently it adds up. 1. https://www.audible.com/pd/Sherlock-Holmes-Audiobook/B06WLMWF2S https://www.audible.com/pd/Sherlock-Holmes-Audiobook/B06WLMW...
summm 4y ago
Audiobooks are usually mono, so 700 kbit/s for uncompressed CD quality. To me parent's numbers sounds like uncompressed. I suspect something went wrong with de-drm/decoding. Should be more like 48 kbit/s for basically transparent mono voice with opus. At this rate, 9 solid months will fit into 142 GB...
- russellbeattie 4y ago
  Whatever OpenAudible.org's default options are obviously aren't as efficient.