Any suggestions on audio walking tours for ipods? Are they worth it or proven to be more of a hassle?

Suggestions for Italy?

what, no takers??

Enter Ipod tours in the search function and you will find several threads about them

At one stage the Guardian in the UK had a few downloadable audio walking tours for free.

When I looked for commercial tours, I found that their price compared very unfavourably with ordinary paper guidebooks.

We've done two that we enjoyed, and I would do it again.

Both of the tours were from Tourcasters.com; one was an 1-long audio (longer when you include walking time) tour of the Barri Gotic in Barcelona. The other was a tour of similar length of Torino, Italy.

In Turin, we had one iPod with a splitter, so DH and I each had a set of earbuds (and were kind of attached to each other). In Barcelona, our son was with us, and he had his tour on his iPod shuffle, and so could walk separately.

For both tours, there was a pdf file with the map, and we were able to follow the map easily. Of course, we could stop or pause the iPod any time we needed.

In both cases, I was looking for a shorter, more specific tour, rather than one that lasted 4 hours and covered all of Venice, for example (which I, for one, would get tired of). There are also many of those longer kinds of audio tours, on Tourcaster and elsewhere.

All of the audio tour companies I considered include the option of listening to a sample of the tour; listen and see if you'd want to listen to an hour or more of the same!

I liked listening to the history and information. I wouldn't do this all the time, and for every location, but as a change from me reading from a guidebook (which I do A LOT, as I'm very interested in history), it worked well and we enjoyed it.

Useful: saved me from renting an audioset from the Orsay and Louvre. Used the Rick Steves downloadable MP3 files on my iPod.

If you have a video pod, there are some fun travel videos you can watch too (maybe while on your flight). Check out iTunes.