Paul R. Potts
It turns out that Audible.com is listening after all. While they still have not responded to their e-mail, I was able to get into a live chat with a live person in response to another issue. An episode of Fresh Air I purchased turned out to be a repeat broadcast of an earlier program. This is usually indicated in the program description, but it was not this time. This is not Audible’s fault; presumably they use the program description WHYY provides.
Upon request they were willing to credit the purchase back to my credit card and remove the duplicate show (actually the same show apparently digitized earlier, in a lower-bitrate format, but with the same filename.
This was quite confusing, and not well-handled by the interface available on their web site. The library pages are not really well-suited for handling things like Fresh Air programs, that may have recurring guests; for example, once you’ve checked out, you can’t get back from the program’s filename listed in your library to the program description that contains the air date and program summary; this may be necessary to distinguish two programs with identical names in the library.
I also figured out, with no help from Audible, why my PowerBook could not burn Audible files to CD-R, while my office G4 desktop machine could; iTunes on my PowerBook was set to burn an MP3 CD, not an audio CD. Audible apparently disallows this, although the error message only says “none of the items can be burned to CD.” I’m still annoyed at having to drag all the Audible files into my office to burn the audio CDs at work, and at Audible’s unresponsiveness to tech-support requests via e-mail. But I’m less annoyed, and getting help from a real person goes a long way towards making me feel better about using the service.