Is there anywhere I can get an English audiobook of the Nikayas, in particular, The Middle Length Discourses? Also, it’s important that the audiobook includes full repetition.
For anyone looking for something similar, the best I’ve come across is Bhikkhu Bodhi’s anthology as an audiobook.
Here is a page that gives a roundup of human voice audio recordings of suttas…
Putting back in all the repetitions is a bit labour intensive and not always straightforward. Even the Pali that we have removes many repetitions. I’m a big fan of having the repetitions put back in, personally. But I’m not aware of anyone who is doing that.
I forgot that Bhante (Bhikkhu) AnandaJoti puts back all the repetitions in his recordings. This is especially wonderful in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, Satipatthana sutta and Anapanasati sutta.
SCVoice has already been mentioned above for good quality computer-generated voices.
Human voice audio coverage of the nikayas is, in contrast, patchy. However, coverage is best for the Middle Length Discourses. Using a combination of PaliAudio and audtip.org, a project of frankk (formerly of this parish), you’ll have access to audios for most of the Majjhima Nikaya (MN). The audtip site is a bit more difficult to navigate these days but here’s a direct link to a simple list of the MN human-recorded audios on that site (most of the MN is covered).
I, too, was passionate about expansion. And the result is MN1 on Voice as Anagarika mentions.
Oddly, now that I regularly listen to DN33, I find that expansion can become excessive.
The Nikayas are somewhat inconsistent in their repetitions, so fully automated expansion is quite difficult. We would expand individual suttas upon request for Voice if the value exceeds the cost.
OK, cool (was more giving SC Voice a general compliment rather than on expansions as such). Sometimes I feel expansions can be good and other times I just want the abbreviated form. I’d imagine automating expansions would be very tricky from a technical viewpoint (easy to do some hand-waving to a human; some of the abbreviations in the SN are very terse and I suspect machines are just not smart enough at this point to connect the dots, or fill in the dots anyway ).
It is very tricky. Sometimes the text to expand is found in the same sutta, sometimes it is from another sutta. That’s not a trivial thing to handle.
My desire for expansions became definitely stilled when I opened MN 1 on Voice for the first time after Karl had expanded it. Listening time for Pali/English side by side, as I usually like to listen, was 3 or 4 hours (don’t remember exactly)!!!
We have just completed recording of the first and second fifty discourses of the Majjhima Nikaya. We include repetition when it relates to teaching points.