Audiobook tech rant:
Having a huge challenge to finish reading the Ramona Quimby series by Beverly Cleary. Some I had read in print, some by audiobook, and some I hadn't read, so decided to read the whole series through in order.
First at a library book sale I obtained an audiobook set on cassette which of course, libraries are discarding if they haven't already. At the time I had a cassette player in my car as well as one in a portable boombox. Ramona and Her Father wasn't in the correct sequence which meant a lot of fast forwarding and rewinding to listen to all the books in order. Otherwise the cassettes were great both at home and in the car.
Unfortunately the two last books were not included in the set. For Ramona Forever, I managed to obtain an extremely used CD which I transferred to an iPod to play in the car. This was horrible. For one, the first CD skipped and I was on a trip where I didn't have my paper copy with me, so I had to go to a library and read from their copy, on which I discovered the skip took up 40 pages. Also, the iPod had to be played through the car's cassette deck using an adaptor, resulting in a huge loss of volume, especially under windy conditions, which had me straining to hear. I spent a lot of trips driving with my chin on the steering wheel which was uncomfortable to say the least.
For Ramona's World, I downloaded a digital copy from online, again to the iPod, an infernal device which is the very spawn of the devil. It has one microscopic dial inaccessible to normal human fingers to control at least 50 functions, and does exactly what it feels like doing at any given time and not what you want it to do. While trying to do one thing, such as rewind, it will turn down the iPod volume just to be mean, when playing through the bloody cassette adaptor volume is already way too low. It does this just to make me pull over to the side of the road and slap it around. When the novelty of every torment it could devise ceased, it took a flying leap, bouncing off my backpack onto the car seat.
The device seemed to have taken no harm, but unbeknownst to me it had skipped from Chapter 7 to Chapter 11, which I didn't notice until further in the story when I started wondering, "When did that happen?" I tried to backtrack but there was no point as I was, for one, hopelessly lost, for another, I could hardly hear the damn thing, and then both the cassette adaptor and two replacements all died horrid deaths.
By then it was about time to buy an iPhone anyway, since I was using an extremely old flip phone and they were up to the 6th model so I got one of the 5th models at a good price. I told the iPod, "You have failed me for the last time," and listed it for sale, but no poor sucker has fallen for it yet, transferred audiofiles to the iPhone, and decided to start the whole book again from the beginning. Since there was no going the cassette tape route in the car with no working adaptors to be had, I bought an after-market deck which is wonderful in every respect--it syncs with your iPhone and charges it while playing so you don't have to worry about recharging at someone else's place and losing your place in the book. (Another nasty little iPod trick was starting back at the beginning if recharged and dying on a long trip if not). The volume is beautiful and easy to adjust. Only thing about the new deck is no cassette player and no place to put one but oh, well, I still have the boombox one at home and thought I'd play the book on a car trip with the iPhone.
Ha. The iPod, filled with bitter malice and vindictive vengeance, told the iPhone to act up on me--don't ask me how as I never connected the devices in any way, if that's even possible to do--but cautioned it not to act bad right away but lull me into a false sense of security and then catch me off guard. So it played To Kill a Mockingbird, downloaded from online, perfectly, but when I tried to play Ramona's World, downloaded the same way, It. Repeated. Every. Darn. Track. So. Every. Five. Minutes. I. Had. To. Hit. The. Screen. To. Advance. The. Story. In other words, in a one-hour drive, I had to hit the screen about a dozen times! This was the exact same copy which played fine when the iPod would let it. (Luckily the phone is mounted on the dash so I did not have to look away from the road, which I would not do for any device no matter how annoying!)
At this point you'd think I'd just give up on the d@mn audiobook and read the print book, of which I have a nice copy, but now it was personal. It's really a wonderful book, excellently narrated by Stockard Channing, and I determined not to let any devilish devices dissuade my listening. With the advancing one track at a time, I managed to get up to the beginning of Chapter 7, where it bailed on me last time.
After several exchanges with my computer guy, wondering if the problem could be my laptop, which is too old to update past 2012, being not current while my iPhone is, I tried a book I KNOW arrived on the iPhone via the following method: 1. Ripped from CDs to my old large computer (which he now has, trying to recover information from a corrupt disk). 2. Copied from the computer to the laptop well over a year ago. 3. Copied from the laptop to the iPhone only a few months ago.
I started playing this book from the beginning and it did the SAME DAMN THING--played the first track and then started over again. This means "all I have to do" to fix the problem is wade through whatever infernal labyrinth some techs from hell have devised to torture iPhone users to find where they have cleverly concealed the setting which causes tracks to repeat and utterly disable and destroy it from the face of the earth. So glad this didn't happen during To Kill a Mockingbird, which got me through lengthy drives to Idaho and Oregon!
The troubling point is, other than install updates to my iPhone, I made NO CHANGES between those trips and the one on which I played the Ramona book, but the iPhone has a mind of its own. Since my mom and I both had recent leg injuries and I am still in a walking cast, I have made a habit of carrying the iPhone in my pocket turned on most of the time, but set on the main screen--because one time I accidentally left it on the message screen and pocket texted a guy a bunch of emoticons! I also pocket dialed my sister once. Despite precautions, nevertheless the thing will TURN ITSELF to iTunes and start playing a story, of its own choice from the several I loaded onto the phone, when I never asked for a story! (When it starts playing stories I never put on the phone, I'll get really worried!)
