readme

Each of the CD's in this commercial program contains about an hour of audio, and
with 53 CD's in all, that's a good 53+ hours of practice in speaking German to
be had. The teaching method is well-regarded and considered sound, and the
quality of the voice actors and recording is uniformly high. The full sales
pitch is given in the included manual.txt file.
German I, II, III ripped from the commercial CD-ROMs (48 discs) into FLAC by
Exact Audio Copy and then further compressed into 48 kbps VBR by LAME (using
foobar2000). German Plus downloaded from existing torrent in presumably 128 kbps
MP3 files (each about 30MB per 30 minute file) and compressed--lossy to lossy
(transcoding)--into 48 kbps VBR MP3 files (again with LAME).
The assumption is that these MP3 files are destined not for audiophiles but
rather for people who will listen to each once or twice and greatly value the
smaller download over any (negligible for the spoken word) gain in sound quality
from distributing the FLAC's or larger lossy files.
Another way in which fat was reduced is that identical files duplicated across
Pimsleur CD's were removed. This meant that you get one copy, not two, of each
of the Readings for the Pimsleur German I. It also means that you don't get the
"Instant Immersion" set, which is really just the first sixteen lessons of
Pimsleur German I, packaged with a new name in a market segmentation scheme.
The other significant difference from other rips of the Pimsleur German learning
course is that the reading booklets (for I, II, and III) have been entered into
machine-readable txt and printable PDF. Other rips have used images from
scanners embedded in PDF's. Although the files provided here result in higher
quality printed pages, some may still want to track down the images and are free
to do so.
A note about German III (copyright 1998) is that it was recorded by a different
process (a less production-savvy one) by the course writer, while German I and
II (copyright 2002) were recorded more professionally with a separate director
and sound engineers. So if you don't like the sound of German III, you can
blame Simon & Schuster. But it is quite serviceable in fact (not annoyingly
bad) once you start doing the course; the main problem is one of perception,
that it is jarring at first, given the high quality of German I and II.
Enjoy and please seed.

Pgina 1