Technology: Downloading Audio From Ximalaya

Horray!  Because I’m procrastinating documenting the kids school progress, I will start the technology series I’ve been meaning to start for awhile.  As you know, all my series die a slow death due to busy life (Chinese library?  Homeschooler profile?  WSA18?).   So I’m not sure how many of these I will do.  But I’ve been wanting to talk about our gradual move to using technology for Thumper for homeschooling, using Line, iPads, Kindles, etc.

I’ll start my series with how I spend hours downloading audio and video content from the Internet instead of prepping.   Why do I download instead of using Youtube, Ximalaya, or other apps?

1. I don’t have unlimited Internet data.
2. I like having everything in one place, namely my iPhone music app or iBooks app
3. These resources disappear!  Especially Ximalaya.  So many of the good ones, if they’re of huge copyrighted books like 小魯‘s 說給兒童的世界歷史 Children-Can-Listen World history or D’Aulaire’s Greek Mythology, or the super good public radio program from Taiwan, they eventually get taken down.
4. We like to Worldschool and travel where there is no Internet.  I like to have things loaded on the iPhone or iPad for the kids to listen to watch during these times.

I won’t mention other non-Chinese resources you can download here.  But this is just a browser extension, so if you can play it on the browser, you can likely download it.  We’ve downloaded many English resources that way.

To start, I have a Mac and I use Chrome.

1. Download Video Download Helper Chrome extension.  Install it.

2. Figure out the Chinese name of the book you want to download.  

For example, for Percy Jackson I Google “Percy Jackson 中文“ .  Sometimes you have to limit it to simplified Chinese, or look for Simplified Chinese results, because often Traditional and Simplified Chinese translation are different.

Once I have it figured out: “波西杰克逊”, I then Google “波西杰克逊  ximalaya” or I copy and paste the name in ximalaya.com.

So many results!

3.  Find the album you like.  

This is the hard part.  Many of these only have a few chapters before people drop them.  Or you listen to them and the sound quality is horrible, or they have this background music that over powers the narration.  It’s one reason I don’t do a lot of ximalaya, the time to research takes so long.

4.  Spend hours downloading the files

For each file, I right click and Open Link in New Tab.  Yes, sometimes that’s 30-40 tabs.

Then for each tab, I Play the file, and then click on the extension to download the file.  I recommend you name each file numerically, using 0 to pad the first few numbers so it sorts properly.

There are a few ways you can download.  You can click on that little down button right under the file, which is Quick Download and will download it to your predefined Download folder.

Or, you can click on the Download button.  To get that to show up, mouse over to the right of the audio file, and a little arrow will show up.

Click on that little arrow and a menu shows up.  You can click Download and it’ll prompt you for the directory and what to name it.  You can do it this way to rename every single file, or wait till all the files are downloaded and rename each one.

5.  Spend more time renaming files.

I rename them so that they’re in numerical order.  Like 01. percy.mp4, 02, percy.mp4, etc.

6.  Merge them into 1 file.

For certain audiobooks like Percy Jackson or Wind in the Willow, I like merging them into one file using the Join Together app.  This way they’re converted to a .m4b audiobook format and I then import them as actual audiobooks.

7.  Open up iTunes and import them into your music library.  

I won’t go into details here.  But for me, I typically put everything into Audiobooks and add a book cover to the files.   I then put them into the kids iPhones when I want them to listen.  But that’s a whole other post about how we use our iTunes and iPhones.

For example, this is what I painstakingly downloaded from ximalaya many moons ago, 寫給兒童的世界歷史, because there’s no CDs for them.

I’m guessing that 95% of people out there don’t love the mindless task of downloading file after file like I have.  But hopefully this post was helpful to the 5% that do!