The Audible ALIEN Saga – Enhanced for Headphones – CORRECTED – Tim Lebbon, Christopher Golden, James A. Moore, William Gibson,Pat Cadigan, Dirk Maggs Free Audiobook

Written by Tim Lebbon, Christopher Golden, James A. Moore, William Gibson,Pat Cadigan, Dirk Maggs
Read by Full Cast
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 192 Kbps
Dramatization

OOPS! I goofed up on of my batch-process numbers for the previous encodes. It was close, but not right, so I have recoded them with the correct settings.

Please stop seeding and delete the old copies, I guarantee these will sound better.

By way of apology for making you download the same file twice, I am including a full-bitrate inAudible rip of the novelisation of Gibson’s Alien 3 as compensation.

The Audible Alien Saga, enhanced to give a binaural-like experience for headphone listening.

I have been using an old iPhone 6S plus, not as a phone, but as an iPod for years now, which I had jailbroken a long time ago. I used an app called ‘Equalizer Everywhere’ to add live time-delayed crossfeed when watching video or listening to radio drama.

It was marvellous, widescreen sound, coming from the front and sides and not at all trapped in my head between my ears. Sadly that phone no longer works and jailbreaking modern iPhones has died on its arse.

So I took to Audacity and did many, many test encodes with different parameters until I finally got to the effect I wanted. I know there are pre-baked ways to enhance stereo audio, but none of them gave me results as good as EQE.

Bare in mind, I’m no audio expert, just an idiot with a wav editor. These encodes sound good to my 57 year-old ears on my Audio Technica ATH M50Xs but for other ears with other headphones, your mileage may vary.

I’d be interested to hear if the wide and in-front effect works for IEMs, and if anyone who knows more than I do wants to leave a comment or advice it would be welcome.

I did this entirely for my own amusement, but was pleased enough with the results to share here.

VBR M4B encoded with a target bitrate of 192kbps. Actual bitrates came in lower.

All four of the recent Alien dramas directed by Dirk Maggs.

Three of the four are now available with 44.1kHz sound. I have re-ordered the 2nd and 3rd stories so they are back in the original published order for the books.

1. Out of the Shadows by Tim Lebbon (44.1kHz) This is cut down from the episodic version, as that copy has upgraded audio. I edited out the re-caps and end credits for the first nine episodes, to make it a more seamless listen. The sound quality drops slightly for the full end credits as the source for those was 22.05kHz

2. Sea of Sorrows by James A Moore (44.1kHz)

3. River of Pain by Christopher Golden (22.05kHz) Apparently Audible hates this story and thinks it doesn’t deserve a quality upgrade.

4. Alien III by William Gibson (44.1kHz) I could not find a clean version of the cover-art for this (I hate the ‘only from Audible’ banner) so I made my own look-alike.

5. William Gibson’s Alien 3 by Pat Cadigan – This audiobook was withdrawn shortly after its release with no reason given.

There is a howler of a mistake which should have been spotted before it made it to release regarding how long Ripley was in hypersleep. It’s a dumb mistake, but withdrawing the entire book seems extreme…

For anyone wondering, this is similar to the plot of the audio drama, but this novelization is based on the first-draft, before the bean-counters demanded re-writes to “make it cheaper.” whereas the drama is the final draft or close to it.