Good Afternoon.
I am sure I read a discussion somewhere on the forum about free daisy players for Mac and came across Olearia. Anyway, I downloaded and for the most part I like it. I don't use a lot of daisy CDs. But a certain organization in the Netherlands that I am now a member of, has started sending me monthly magazines on daisy CD. Nice, but I don't have a daisy player, so Olearia is my only option. However, these CDs seem to be formatted in a weird way. Every time I put one in the CD tray, Olearia tells me that the CD doesn't specify which type of media it contains and I am given two options to chose from. Text only. Or Audio Only. It doesn't matter which option I chose. The CD won't play. Last year I was given a Daisy CD during a convention for the visually impaired. For some reason I saved it. Which is good, because I can now test it with Olearea and have realized it plays as soon as Olearia sees its mounted.
Can anyone tell me why this random CD plays, and the monthly CDs fro the organization I am a member of, don't play? I have discovered that I can access the files on the CD via finder. Here I can find the mp3 files the CD contains, and I can play them with iTunes. But this is annoying, its a Daisy CD, I would like to be able to use it the way its meant to be used.
Thanks for any help you guys can offer.
Greetings from the Netherlands.
Comments
Olearia
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I don't think Olearia has been updated for several years. If I had to guess (and guessing is all I can do since I don't live in the Netherlands) I'd say that they're using a newer DAISY standard than Olearia supports.
Using DAISY cds seems an odd way to go about things these days. DAISY cd players aren't the easiest to come by, and a lot of computers are ditching the optical drive in any case. That doesn't even count those who don't bother with a computer and use only mobile devices, and that's an ever increasing number of people.
Do they have a way to download these magazines instead? There are some nice DAISY playing apps on iOS. If not you can probably transfer the cd content to an iOS device. I haven't heard of any current DAISY players for the Mac in a long time. I'm not even sure how many there are for Windows now, come to think of it.
Odd Dutch ways
Hi Jake.
As the title suggests, the Dutch seem to like doing things which are different than the rest of the world. Most of the blind community doesnt seem to like anything technical, so Daisy CDs and the big lumpy players are very popular. I am currently in discussion with the organisation who keeps sending me the CDs. They seem to insist on doing it that way, or want to sent me a digital text copy of their magazine. But, i dont read braille and dont want to listen to voiceover read a whole 25 page magazine.
You are correct that Olearia hasnt been updated for some time, and i agree with your conclusion that its probably not able to support the daisy format of these cds. Windows has more up to date players available, but my windows pc is inconvenient and not totally accessible.
being able to listen with my ios device would be so much nicer.... Thats my next question for the organisation.
Otherwise they just need to send me the mp3 files.
Thx for taking the time to reply.
DAISY
The reason that these magazines won't play could be due to missing or incorrect metadata. DAISY files need a lot of markup to ensure that they have all of the extra navigational elements that you would want. To see if your app or the magazine is the issue, try some of the books on this website: http://www.daisy.org/sample-content. Using these sample books, you can try to identify whether the problem is with the book or your app. Can the organisation from which you are receiving these magazines suggest any other applications that you could use? Alternatively, would they loan you a DAISY playback device. If you have the folder containing all of the DAISY files, you could transfer the whole folder to an iOS app.
Transferring to iOS
It should be possible to copy all the files from the cd, zip them up, and send them to an app such as Voice Dream Reader on iOS in order to play them. Since they're mp3 files, that means the content isn't encrypted, so you don't have to deal with that headache. We in the US could learn something from that aspect, at least.