News Picard Audio Drama Announced - No Man's Land
- Thread starter Tuskin38
- Start date
Interesting. Does anybody know how it is to be distributed? (I'm looking for physical media. Any kind of physical media (well, maybe not reel-to-reel or DAT, but . . .)
S&S typically sells through all the standard audiobook retailers but in this day and age I've be very surprised to see a CD or anything like. I suppose you could download the file onto a USB drive or microSD card or something if you want it stored somewhere? Or even burn it onto a CD.
The description is exactly the kind of Star Trek story that I don't typically enjoy, but I enjoyed the Sulu audiodramas of the past and I'm desperate for more Picard, so here I am contemplating buying this.
Which is of course entirely possible with any audio source I can successfully feed into my stereo system.
Audible audiobooks have DRM, so you can't burn it to a CD. Hell, even though I can upload my Audible titles to iTunes, and then to one of my decrepit iPods, I can't stream them to my Apple TV that will stream everything else in iTunes, in what I assume is another example of DRM preventing me from enjoying content I paid for.
Very cool news! I love Big Finish’s full cast Doctor Who audio dramas, so if this is anything like the quality of those, I’m excited for it.
startrek.com said:
You buried the lede a bit there, @Tuskin38 !
This is interesting news! To be totally honest, I'm not really that into audiobooks. I think there was only one of the three Captain Sulu adventures that I thought was half-decent. I did enjoy Spock vs. Q, though. But the story does intrigue me, and it's co-scripted by Kirsten Beyer, and stars both Michelle Hurd and Jeri Ryan, so I'm interested in checking it out!
Guess I have to investigate Audible... since I don't generally read audiobooks, I've never used it before. Hopefully there is a way to listen to them on a PC, and it's not just strictly limited to a smartphone app or something.
And if we're venturing back into exclusive formats, the return of eBook-exclusive novellas or novels would be welcomed, too!
With an audio CD-R drive, you can burn any line-level signal (and in a pinch, you can get something "close enough for jazz" out of most headphone jacks) to a CD. Of course, you have to use audio CD media (which is digitally imprinted with some sort of code needed to enable audio CD drives, and surcharged to support the recording industry), and digital-to-digital copying on an audio CD-R drive is subject to SCMS, but it will work. I have CD copies of a number of LPs (both for convenience and to avoid wearing out the LPs, many of which are quite rare antiques), and also of one or two long-out-of-print CDs that I no longer let out of the house.
I take as much pride, by the way, in the fact that I don't own a hardware MP3 player (and rarely use software MP3 players) as I do in the fact that I still use a clamshell cell phone.
And while I'm certainly up for an original audio drama, I likewise refuse to buy audiobooks, just as I refuse to buy ebooks that also exist in print form.
I take as much pride, by the way, in the fact that I don't own a hardware MP3 player (and rarely use software MP3 players) as I do in the fact that I still use a clamshell cell phone.
And while I'm certainly up for an original audio drama, I likewise refuse to buy audiobooks, just as I refuse to buy ebooks that also exist in print form.
It will be available from other retailers without DRM:
- Libro.fm (it already has a listing, so that's one for sure)
- S&S's site lists that it will be available from Google Play; no listing yet so we can't tell for sure if it'll be DRM-free, but since the other Trek audiobooks from them are, I remain expectant
- Downpour doesn't have a listing yet, but they've carried all the recent Trek books so hopefully the listing just needs to propagate like with Google Play
Perhaps it will get a printed version, as Star Wars did with Dooku: Jedi Lost
I didn't know those were a thing.
It's great to see this finally out in the world! I've always held that audio is a perfect medium for Star Trek and I hope this will be the first in many more stories to come...
Side note: the terms audiobook and audio drama aren't interchangeable - these are two different things. Audiobooks are generally one voice actor, reading out a text with little or no accompaniment, whereas audio dramas are more like radio plays, with shorter duration and a cast of multiple actors, sound effects and music, etc. No Man's Land is going to be the latter, something we haven't seen in Trek lit since the Sulu audios nearly 30 (!) years ago... I'm excited to hear it!
Side note: the terms audiobook and audio drama aren't interchangeable - these are two different things. Audiobooks are generally one voice actor, reading out a text with little or no accompaniment, whereas audio dramas are more like radio plays, with shorter duration and a cast of multiple actors, sound effects and music, etc. No Man's Land is going to be the latter, something we haven't seen in Trek lit since the Sulu audios nearly 30 (!) years ago... I'm excited to hear it!
I am interested in these two people, but it's also interesting that they would make an audio drama for a show starring Patrick Stewart, who's got one of the most recognizable voices in the world, and not cast Stewart. Though I assume there'll be more of these incoming. I imagine when you've got the crew together for a show, getting a few cast members for a handful of hours to record some new dialogue for a subsidiary project isn't a huge investment.
