Getting Your News as MP3s?

GreenKiwi asks: "I've been really interested in finding a news source that has MP3s of their brodcasts. I have an iPod and download the news in text form most mornings to it so that I can find out what's going on. However, I would love to download (preferably automatically) news in the form of an MP3 that I could download to my iPod in the morning so that I could listen to the news on my way to work. The BBC has Real Audio output, but no MP3s that I can find. NPR has them for Real and WMP. I guess I could download and then convert the files. If that's possible. I'd love to hear whether anyone is doing this and how."

No Idea

[SuperSnooper]

Sorry, no clue at all.

old school: why waste memory?

[kris_lang]

This may seem out of style, but why waste energy converting text to MP3 speech if you can have a system that will read it. I honestly used to have the text news read to me by my PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet) from a simpletext file. I'd download a mass of text files in the a.m., saved as plain text, trimmed of everything above the lede and after the copyright, and la voila , plain text ready to be read by my powerbook.

That is what Apple ought to add to the next redo of the iPod: a text to speech reader to read your ebooks or news or email for you. And just consider that instead of wasting 1 MB per minute of MP3 audio news reading, you could have less than 32k of plain text for 5 to 10 minutes of news reading. That would be a kicker.

I first did the Powerbook "read me my news" trick in January of 1999, when it was only a month old for me. I learned quickly to put all of the stories I wanted in either one big text file or in multiple cascaded text files so that I wouldn't have to use the touchpad. Just hitting the Apple-A to select all the text and Apple-H to have it "speak the selection".