[erroneus]

I have found my 8100 to be very useful for playing back audio books. My earphone is mono and uses just one of my ear resources which is good. The trouble is in trying to pull over just any MP3s into the blackberry. I can re-encode the MP3s but it would be helpful to know the minimum standards I can apply so that I can get the smallest possible MP3s to play.

Just this morning I was attempting to play some very tightly encoded MP3s and it completely crashed my Blackberry. That was a problem to be sure. So now I am re-encoding those same files but they are getting almost 10 times bigger.

So much like the "vid2bb.sh" script, I plan to write an mp3-to-bb.sh script to create minimally-sized MP3s for my audio book listening pleasure.

So anyone know the minimal acceptable settings?

[rivviepop]

Originally Posted by erroneus

Just this morning I was attempting to play some very tightly encoded MP3s and it completely crashed my Blackberry.

What are your MP3 details? It would take only a few moments to sit here and start with your crashing format and gently increase (decrease?) the LAME encoding params upwards and test them all out.

#!/bin/sh

FREQ="8 11.025 12 16 22.05 24 32 44.1 48"
BITS="8 16 24 32"
MODE="s j f d m"

INFILE="input.wav"
OUTFILE="output"
LAME="/usr/bin/lame"

for ii in ${FREQ}; do
  for jj in ${BITS}; do
    for zz in ${MODE}; do
      $LAME -s $ii -b $jj -m $zz $INFILE $OUTFILE_${ii}_${jj}_${zz}.mp3
    done
  done
done

exit 0

Run that code and you get 180 MP3 files to slap on your device and test it out.

[erroneus]

An interesting idea oh master of the script. I certainly will!

[Timpoet]

Sooo, how can a newb get audio books to listen to that work on the Pearl?

Tis a very intriguing idea.

[rivviepop]

Originally Posted by Timpoet

Sooo, how can a newb get audio books to listen to that work on the Pearl?

What format is your audiobook in? Is there a sample you could (legally) post for us to look at?

[erroneus]

Uhm... the pirate bay...

Either that or if you want to take the time, you can often get audio books from the library and copy'm or rip'm.

To date, I have listened to college lectures people had published on the pirate bay, a horrible reading of James Clavell's Shogun (read it twice already but love the story) and "From Good to Great." I have some other audio books waiting for my attention but have been either too busy or too tired to work on the idea any further, but I do have some harry potter audio books I may give a listen to... I listen while driving, while working... in the bathroom... just about anywhere.

[rivviepop]

If you like Sci-Fi, check out Escape Pod.

[erroneus]

I never did work up the courage to risk rebooting or crashing my BB by playing various encodings. However, I did some further googling and I found this page:

Comprehensive Blackberry Pearl 8100 Guide - PinStack.com - Blackberry Forums

Look for "Media Guide" some way down the page. There you will find the specification range for MP3 encoding. 16Khz seems to be the minimum sample rate and I do not know what the lowest bits per second rate might be but I have selected 16kbps and that seems to work... sound quality does suffer a great deal though.