Travel and Leisure
Ok, so this is how much of a travel geek I am. Let me back up a little bit. My number one travel tip that I give to people who are going or returning to Europe, is to take advantage of the free walking tours with Rick Steves Audio Europe App. If you read the article, you'll understand why this is the way to go to get insight and historical information about the sites and attractions you are visiting. Sure, you could get a local guide, but then you are on a schedule, and who wants that while you're on vacation?
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| RC Walking Tours recording studio |
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| Self-guided tours require reading |
So for our upcoming trip to France, I picked up a couple of his guidebooks. I noticed that he has written self-guided tours for places not covered on his Audio Europe app, but instead you have to read them while you are at those locations. We've actually done this recently for our last European trip; for each new place we went to in Croatia, we looked up free self-guided tours and would cut & paste the text onto our phones. With this info literally in hand, we'd walk around town, and one of us would read it aloud, so we knew what we were looking at. I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time, so reading and walking are definitely out of the question. And while this was better than no context at all, I prefer to have someone telling me the background or history while I walk and explore (not to mention the issue with my far-sighted vision).
This got me to thinking, what if I just dictated what Rick has written and recorded it to a file to play on my iPhone? And that's what I decided to do today... well for one walking tour. It took me a bit to figure out the best way to record and edit the file, but now that I've done one, it is going to make the rest easier. It's still a bit of work, as I'm not a natural orator, and my pronunciation of some of the names and places is definitely a little off. I also found that the best way to play these on an iPhone is to bind and upload the recordings as an M4B file and then load as an audiobook using the Books app.
That way, when you are using playback, you have access to controls to skip forward or more likely, backwards, by 15 seconds. I used the
AudioBookBinder app (Mac), so there are “chapters” that are available via that control, which allows you to jump to a specific spot on the tour, just like the Rick Steves app. Also, using the Books app, it will remember where you are, so that if you decide to take a break for a coffee, or spot a shop that you want to go into, you don't need to fast forward back to pick up your place in the recording again. Where the map in the Rick Steves book has numbered points of interest, I've used the same numbering plan.
Because of copyright law, I can't post the recordings I've made from his books here. I did cobble together some other tours from stuff I found on Wikipedia etc., along with a few snippets here and there from Rick, but the only way I have found that I can share these is through a convoluted method of renaming the files to MP3 so that they upload properly to my Google drive. You could simply play these as you do any other music files, but if you were to rename them back to M4B ones, they will load into the Books app on a Mac (iTunes on Windows) and subsequently the Books app on your iPhone. Please bear in mind that I am not a professional voice-over artist, and I didn't take any time to research proper pronunciations of names and places. Some are short, brief introductions of the places to go, and others are longer, as there is more walking involved.
Update: Today, I just made my own tour for Besançon, cobbled together from the city's tourism website and Wikipedia, and posted the file
here. When you click on the link, a page will open up where you can preview the file. There is a little download icon in the top right corner where you can save the file to your computer and rename the extension to .m4b as described above. It is nowhere near as polished as the ones that Rick has written; unfortunately, very little information about the sights of Besançon can be found on the web, so the depth is lacking somewhat.
