Helpful Audio Resources

[Tanay]

What are some audio resources (lectures, podcasts, etc.) that are useful for quiz bowl?

I don't mean audio resources that are specific to quiz bowl ("9 minutes", etc), but instead, resources like the lectures offered by The Teaching Company. However, I would prefer not to pay hundreds of dollars for the same stuff I could find for free under a different name or provider.

The BBC's "World Book Club" has interviews with authors like Achebe, Eco, and Walcott that are interesting, useful, and free on iTunes. Has anyone found similarly useful podcasts?

[BGSO]

I'm pretty sure if you dug around MIT's OCW you could find some pretty useful lectures.

[Mike Bentley]

I was going to write a guide for this for a PACE project that never got finished.

Some good resources:

The Teaching Company - They have a bunch of lectures in a bunch of subjects. Some of the lectures are better than others. I've listened to dozens of the courses, so if you want some specific recommendations, I can provide them (some of the best ones off the top of my head at The Civil War, the Supreme Court, History of Human Language). The best legitimate way to get these is to go to your library--they probably have a good selection of lectures that you can borrow and rip to your harddrive. You can also torrent them, I believe.

Modern Scholar - Pretty much a knock-off of the Teaching Company. If you're into purchasing these things for some reason, they're cheaper. These should also be available at your local library.

Professionally Recorded Audiobooks - Your local library will certainly have a plethora of audiobooks, although most of them will be crap. If you can search and hold books online, I'd go through a list of authors you're interested in and search for whether they're available in audiobook form. If those options aren't available, just go to the library and search through the shelves. After you run out of books in your local library, go to other ones in your county--your library card will almost certainly work at these places.

Librivox.org - A pretty good selection of free audiobooks for books in the public domain. There's a lot less crap here than you'll find at your local library. Additionally, you'll find some non-fiction stuff like philosophy and social science that you'd almost never find professionally done. The main drawback is that the quality of these recordings is often unlistenably bad. For every good book I've listened to (H. G. Wells' Invisible Man) I've started a bunch of really awful ones. Also, the interface to browse books is probably the worst interface I've seen on the Internet since 1997, which is annoying.

Online audiobook download sites - I'm currently subscribed to emusic.com's audiobook service, where you get 1 audiobook per month. This is a pretty good way to get new books, as your library will probably take a while to get them. Other resources include audible.com. These sites tend to have books categorized better, so it's easier to find the type of books you want.

Overdrive Audiobooks - Your library probably has something like this. They have a decent selection of stuff which you can "rent" for free. I think these files have DRM, but they now work on more formats, most notably audiobooks.

Podcasts - There are probably some good podcasts out there for academic quizbowl purposes, but I haven't really searched for these.

Simply Audiobooks - "Netflix for audiobooks". It's a bit expensive (something like $15-$18 per month for one CD at a time), but they have a good selection.

[Kwang the Ninja]

If you haven't already found it, iTunes U has a bunch of free lectures from esteemed universities available for download. The only one I've checked out so far is an Intro to Philosophy lecture from Oxford, but it seems like a pretty good service (and it's free!).

[dtaylor4]

I heartily endorse Librivox. Its selection is sketchy right now, but it has a number of classics, and they are broken up so you can listen to individual sections.