Are my purchases confidential?

Purchasing is a simple process (note that you must be an adult age 18 or older to make a purchase). When you click on "Buy Now!", you will be sent to a separate 100% secure server where the actual money transaction takes place (if nothing happens, please read this).

First you will be asked for your country and postal code. Next you will be asked to choose your electronic payment method (US Dollars). Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover, DC, and JCB are accepted, as well as PayPal. You will also be asked to provide a valid Name and Email Address (for verification purposes). Finally you will be given an order receipt number and directed to the CoolBeat webpage where you can download your MP3 audiobook. To avoid possible problems; once you begin the order process on the secure server, please do not use the "back" button on your browser, or stop until you reach the "download" page!

Coolbeat.biz does not record any personal information, so it is very important that you write down your purchase order receipt number that you receive from our electronic payment facilitator (as that is the only way we can verify you have made a legitimate purchase). After 60 days all sales are considered final (regardless of whether you downloaded your file or not), so please download you file promptly.

What is a Downloadable Audiobook?

An audiobook is a combination of ancient oral tradition and modern technology. CoolBeat audiobooks are contemporary books, recovered literature, and unpublished works, that are spoken aloud onto a recording, so you can enjoy them in your car, at the beach, at the gym, in the dark, or whenever/wherever reading would be impractical. Our audiobooks are especially popular with teachers and students, as they provide the word-for-word experience of reading a printed book. CoolBeat is a proud member of the prestigious Audio Publishers Association.

Our CoolBeat audiobooks are MP3 audio computer files that you download onto your computer from our server. We do not add audio degrading watermarks, Digital Rights Management technology, or personally identifying information to our files as do some other audiobook vendors. Once you have downloaded (Saved-to-Disk) your file, you can copy it onto any device/media you may own for your personal listening pleasure (see our copyright statement for details).

What is an MP3 file?

CoolBeat master recordings are high-fidelity 44.1KHz 16-bit PCM monophonic WAV files. Unfortunately the WAV audio format produces files that are quite large (about 650Mb for a 70 minute audio CD), so we needed to compress the files to make downloading practical. We have chosen to offer both high quality monophonic 128Kbps MP3 and faster downloading monophonic 64Kbps MP3 files as the audio formats for distributing our audiobooks. These MP3 formats are a good compromises between file size and sonic quality, and our MP3 bitrates are compatible with nearly every MP3 music player (such as the popular iPod and PocketDISH players). More information about MP3 can be found on the "Howstuffworks" website.
Caution: Please verify that you have sufficient free storage space and sufficient time to download, before making your audiobook purchase.

Why are CoolBeat recordings so good?

The CoolBeat studio uses quality talent and high-end professional grade recording gear. Our newest recorder is a top-end Marantz digital recorder, custom enhanced by Oade Brothers Audio. We also have a large selection of quality microphones that we carefully match to our voice talent. Typically this would be a shockmounted Rode NTK tube microphone which we have had custom modified to use an outstanding hand selected vintage NOS Siemens vacuum tube. We use Sennheiser HD-600 audiophile headphones for monitoring our readers.

How long does it take to create a finished audiobook recording?

CoolBeat has been blessed with a very productive team of professionals. Typically our Voice Talent will have been in the studio recording for at least 3.5 hours to produce every 1 hour of finished audiobook length (a single-spaced typewritten page of text equates to slightly over three minutes of clean audio). In order to avoid over stressing our talents voices, each recording session will typically last no more than about 2.5 hours.

Editing the raw recording is the longest and most demanding processes. At the very least, the Sound Editor will have to listen to the entire length of all raw recorded material plus the final edit. Typically the editing process will take five times as long as the entire raw recording length (and has often taken far longer).

Inevitably the Sound Editor will find some mistake in the raw recording that needs to be re-recorded. About two weeks after the final recording session, the Voice Talent will usually have to come back into the studio for about an hour to re-record various paragraphs. The Sound Editor will then insert these re-recordings, and make any final volume level or other adjustments to the CoolBeat audiobook.