Paris, Versailles iPod MP3 Audio Walking Tour
Let your iPod be your tour guide through the Versailles Palace, Free
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For decades, Rick Steves has been the tour guide in your pocket — writing guidebooks to help travelers have smooth, enjoyable, and culturally broadening trips to Europe. But now, thanks to new portable audio devices, Rick is becoming the tour guide in your ear. With his new, free audio tours for iPod (and other MP3 players), Rick can personally lead you through Paris' top sights.
Rick Steves' Audio Tours are informative, lighthearted, and a third less dry than the audioguides you can rent in Europe. They're illustrated with color images to help you find the item that's being described. And best of all, you can download them free and play them whenever you want. Just put the audio tours on your iPod, pop in your ear buds, and let Rick Steves guide you through the treasures of Paris: ogle the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum, understand the evolution of Impressionism at the Orsay Museum, pretend you're a divine right king at the sumptuous Château of Versailles, and wander through the centuries in Paris' most historic neighborhood. Armchair travelers can listen to the same tours without flying to France.
Rick's audio tours are a natural companion to the Rick Steves' Paris 2006 guidebook, which features additional maps, photos of key works of art, and sightseeing strategies for these great sights, plus lots more information on experiencing the City of Light. But even if you don't have Rick's book, we've prepared downloadable, printer-friendly maps to accompany each tour.
How to Download Rick Steves' Audio Tours
Four Rick Steves' Audio Tours are currently available: the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum, Versailles, and the Historic Paris Walk. Each tour can be played on your computer or on a portable MP3 player (such as an iPod).
Download Rick Steves' Audio Tours from this Website
You can download the audio tours directly from this website. Note that for each tour, there are two files: an MP3 audio file (each one about 45 MB), and a PDF of printer-friendly maps that accompany the tour.
Versailles Palace
Download Versailles mapsIf you're having trouble using these .Zip files on Windows XP/Windows 2000, you can find instructions here.
How to Use Rick Steves' Audio Tours
Once the audio tours are on your computer, you can listen to them using any software program that plays MP3s. Most travelers will use iTunes to put the audio tours on an iPod, but you can also listen to them on your computer.
When the audio tour begins, you'll hear Rick describing the history of each work of art or attraction, while co-hosts Kate Fleming and Joan Robinson help you navigate to the next stop. As the tour plays, you'll see small photos of what's being described. At the bottom of the screen, you'll also notice a "timeline" for the entire Audio Tour, broken into chapters — each one describing a different stop on the tour, and each one illustrated by a different image. At any time, you can skip to the next stop by pressing the right/forward arrow, and you can go back to the previous stop by pressing the left/back arrow. Pressing the play/pause button temporarily stops or re-starts the commentary.
The center button on your iPod — right in the middle of the click wheel — can be pressed to toggle through various displays. If you press it once, you'll see a subtitle just above the timeline noting where you are in the tour; when you see this subtitle, you can rotate the click wheel to move quickly forward and backward within the audio tour. If you press the center button twice in rapid succession, you'll see a larger version of the image illustrating the commentary. If you press the button three times in a row, you'll see more written details about the tour — including the cost, opening hours, and location of the museum being described. If you press it a fourth time, you'll go back to the main screen.
Maps for the Audio Tours
Ideally, use the audio tours with a copy of Rick Steves' Paris guidebook. But if you don't have the book, you can download printer-friendly maps in PDF format (described above; available on this website. Once these files are on your computer, simply open them, print them out, and take them along.
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Paris, Versailles iPod MP3 Audio Walking Tour
Welcome to the Versailles Palace - download your audio guide
