Foundation – The Complete Series [chapterized m4b] – Isaac Asimov Free Audiobook

Written by Isaac Asimov
Read by William Hope, Scott Brick, Larry A. McKeever, Jack Fox, Roy Avers
Format: M4B
Bitrate: Mixed
Unabridged

This one has been a labor of love.

The complete collection of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, in single file chapterized m4b, fully tagged with metadata and cover art. All books are in the highest audio quality I could find. For each audiobook there is a choice of narrators. They are all Plex/Prologue ready.

I did not include all narrators that exist for each book, since many older recordings are of very poor quality. I simply tried to choose narrators based on what you might want to listen to today – I prioritized quality over quantity.

If you are looking for other narrators for these books, @Hellblazer1138 has a more complete collection here: https://audiobookbay.lu/abss/isaac-aysimov-audio-book-collection-isaac-asimov-2/

Included:

1951 – Foundation
—(Read by William Hope)
—(Read by Scott Brick)
—(Read by Jack Fox)

1952 – Foundation and Empire
—(Read by William Hope)
—(Read by Scott Brick)
—(Read by Jack Fox)

1953 – Second Foundation
—(Read by William Hope)
—(Read by Scott Brick)
—(Read by Jack Fox)

1982 – Foundation’s Edge
—(Read by William Hope)
—(Read by Scott Brick)

1986 – Foundation and Earth
—(Read by William Hope)
—(Read by Larry A. McKeever)

1988 – Prelude to Foundation
—(Read by William Hope)
—(Read by Scott Brick)

1991 – Forward the Foundation
—(Read by William Hope)
—(Read by Larry A. McKeever)

Also, included is the authorized “Second Foundation” prequel trilogy of books that were released with permission of the Asimov estate:

1997 – Foundation’s Fear – Gregory Benford
—(Read by Roy Avers)

1998 – Foundation & Chaos – Greg Bear
—(Read by Roy Avers)

1999 – Foundation’s Triumph – David Brin
—(Read by Roy Avers)

These are not my rips, but I went in and added cover art and complete metadata (book description, narrator, genre etc.) and converted each audiobook to a single file m4b, if it was not one already. Cover art was typically sourced from /r/audiobookcovers since many of the older recordings did not have decent cover art. All artwork is tramp-stamp free!

Note: For the old tape recordings, I streamlined the start by editing out much of the extraneous material, such as the bibliographies, table of contents or author biographies (these were long since out of date anyway). Only the Introductions or Afterwords were kept. The Jack Fox narration was originally a single omnibus edition of the original Foundation trilogy, which I edited into three separate books. The original Introduction by Michael Dirda plays at the start of “Foundation”.

Shout out to @Hellblazer1138 for his superlative Asimov collection – many of his rips were used to create this one!

Enjoy!

PLEASE SEED ONCE YOU HAVE FINISHED DOWNLOADING

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A General Note on Audiobook Metadata

One of my frustrations with the audio content I download from ABB is the amount of time I end up spending to fix the metadata and add cover art to make it work nicely with Plex/Prologue. With that in mind, all audio content I share on ABB will always have complete and correct metadata, including:

– Author and Title
– Description (using the DESCRIPTION field read that can read by Plex)
– Narrator (using the COMPOSER field which can be read by Prologue)
– Genre Tags (I add all relevant Genres typically taken from Goodreads. These can be used to create smart collections in Plex.)
– Cover Art (I always use the highest resolution image I can find. Where none exists, I will find a suitable image from the internet – often r/audiobookcovers – or create one based on existing artwork.
– Date (For audiobooks I use the year the book was first published. For audio dramas I use the year the drama was produced.)

Furthermore, the audio will always be in m4b format (to support chapter markers and ensure Plex can read the Description tag). The audio will always be correctly chapterized, and chapter markers will be named.

This means that all content I share here can be considered Plex/Prologue-ready with all metadata and artwork included. I hope this encourages others to do the same.

** Why use a single file m4b? **

– m4b files support chapter markers which mp3s don’t allowing for chapter breaks in a single file
– Plex is able to read the the book description from m4b (which it can’t for mp3)
– a single file is easier to manage and faster to index in your media library
– m4b offers better compression than mp3
– Allows for better support of multiple versions of the same book with different narrators. In Plex there is a bug that sometimes causes files from one version of a book to get grouped with the other version of the book with a different narrator. You can work around this by making the book title “Foundation & Earth (Read by Scott Brick)” but it’s clunky and not a great solution. With a single file m4b you can leave the title as is – it just works. To be doubly sure two versions of a book do not conflict with each other, you can put track = 1/1 and disk = 1/1 in the metadata. I also put the album artist in the sort album title. e.g. “Foundation [05] Foundation and Earth (Brick)”. This way the two versions can coexist in the Plex library without issue. It also works in AudioBookshelf.

Tools Used

I typically edit metadata using kid3 and for audio editing I use Ocenaudio. For adding/editing chapter markers I use Subler or Ocenaudio. For converting to a single file m4b, I use AudioBookConverter.