Help my mother get into MP3s

April 26, 2007 6:08 AM

Looking for a way to get my 60 year old mother into the mp3 generation. My mother is 62 once a hippy now a conservite. Her viewing pleasure on tv include CNN, Greys atonomy, Heroes, and Lost to name a few other things. She is addicted to audio book cassettes (alot of mystery stuff growing up she like murder she wrote but the climate of tv has changed and so has her taste) and i am trying to find her some podcast that might be up her alley (she likes to garden, cook, drink and is a dog and cat lover ) since i am not a 62 year old woman and have no idea what podcast most would find interesting i have decide to consult the hive mind for answers. I am doing this in hopes to get her to abandon the tape format of audio books and move into the digital information age of podcasting i think she might enjoy it more since she typical spends large amounts of time traveling for her job. I think it will be easier and more beneficial in the long run to get her moving on this technology while she is flexible enough to adapt to it.
posted by Rolandkorn to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

Why don't you buy her an iPod, start an iTunes account for her, and pre-load it with audio books? She'll run out of them eventually, and then you can teach her how to buy new ones.

If you help her make the transition with something that's mostly familiar, branching out to the more unfamiliar podcasts should be a breeze.

(I just upgraded my 55 year old mom from books on tape to books on CD- audiobooks on iTunes is next!)
posted by headspace at 6:47 AM on April 26, 2007

60 isn't that old. We just gave an iPod to someone who's almost 80 and she loves it. Knows how to download podcasts, rip CDs, all that good stuff.
posted by bink at 7:59 AM on April 26, 2007

I got some audiobooks on audible.com and really liked them. Not too expensive, easy to use, good selection.
posted by selfmedicating at 8:21 AM on April 26, 2007

I second Audible - my wife's mother is nearly 70 and loves her iPod Nano for audiobooks.

Don't forget your local library has tons of audiobook CD's - heck ours now even has audiobooks pre-formatted as MP3.

Also - if she has a ton of audiobooks on tape and you can't find them on CD or via audible, then there is the handy PlusDeck 2c - a cassette drive for your computer that will assist in converting cassettes to MP3.

I will shortly (within 1-month) be selling mine as soon as I finish my wife's backlog of cassettes (still have 2 crates to go) - the only drawback of the PlusDeck is that it records in realtime - so if the book is 10 hours long, it takes 10 hours and unless you turn your computer speakers off, you get to/have to listen to it.
posted by jkaczor at 8:35 AM on April 26, 2007

He's probably more tech savvy than your mom, but my dad just turned 65 and I got him and iPod, which he's instantly taken to.

Seconding the suggestion to pre-load with some audiobooks from the iTunes store. She'll probably dig NPR's podcasts as well, of which there are a zillion.
posted by mkultra at 11:13 AM on April 26, 2007

Podiobooks is my first stop for free mp3/podcasted audio books. There's a pretty wide variety.

It hasn't been updated in yonks, but I've worked my way through the archive episodes of Soap Detectives, a podcast featuring classic mystery radio plays.

Also, I've just started listening to Decoder Ring Theatre, which seems to be a modern homage to the old radio mystery serials.

If your mum might listen to science fiction/fantasy stories, then Escape Pod has a fantastic selection of stories read aloud. And Spaceship Radio is a collection of classic science fiction radio plays.

NPR, BBC, CBC, and ABC (Australia) all have heaps of their programs available as podcasts.
posted by weegreentoad at 6:15 PM on April 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

This American Life and Fresh Air recently both became available as podcasts.
posted by robabroad at 1:22 PM on April 27, 2007