Comments on: Importing MP3 audiobooks into iTunes

By: Aleister

Aleister — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 03:31:09 +0000

The trick to keep your audiobooks from showing up under your regular music sections (albums.. artists.. etc..) is to leave those fields blank in the file info under iTunes. :)

By: hugh

hugh — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 16:24:16 +0000

thought you would be interested in the LibriVox project:
LibriVox asks volunteers to record chapters of books in the public domain in digital format. We then release the audio files backs into the public domain. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. Our objective: to have all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format, on the internet.

we have a small catalog now (10 titles) buts should have 30 by end of 2005, and who knows how many by end 2006.

check: librivox.org

happy listening,
hugh.

By: Alderete

Alderete — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:08:37 +0000

m rohr: While MP3 Surgeon will probably join together the imported tracks of an MP3 audio CD, it looks like a fairly labor-intensive process, on a per-book basis. It’s also Windows-only, which means I’m less likely to try it out myself; I try to be mostly agnostic here, but I’m definitely a Mac OS X user in real life. ;-)

By: m rohr

m rohr — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 15:43:45 +0000

a software program called mp3 sugeon will solve all your problems

By: Alderete

Alderete — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 15:09:28 +0000

Harry: The short answer is no, there is no way to get these versions to play on an iPod. The audiobooks are wrapped in a Microsoft Windows-only digital rights management (DRM) encoding, to prevent the books from being copied. Breaking the DRM to play the books on an iPod is illegal under current US law (as well as in many other countries).

The best bet is for all iPod owners to pester our libraries about compatibility with the iPod. It seems to me that it’s a poor use of taxpayer money to license digital versions of audiobooks which cannot be played on the handheld audio player with 80% of the market. Better to spend that money on additional audiobooks on CD, which a wider range of library patrons can enjoy.

Even though, yes, this does mean we’ll need to keep going to the library in person to get the books.

By: Harry

Harry — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:13:13 +0000

Many public libraries now offer downloadable audio books free, just like checking out the tape version. IPod will not accept them. Anyone know if there is a solution to this problem other than buying another MP3 player?

By: Alderete

Alderete — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 06:30:12 +0000

Laura: In iTunes 6, in the Get Info window, on the Options tab, is an option “Skip when shuffling”. Make sure this is checked for all your audiobook tracks, and that should do the trick.

I don’t know if this option existed in iTunes 5; it does not exist in iTunes 4.x. But iTunes 6 is a free upgrade, so no sense in not upgrading to get the new feature. Note that you may also need to update your iPod at the same time (though that’s less likely if you just bought a new iPod!).

By: Laura

Laura — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:36:28 +0000

Hello! I just got an ipod (this is my third day of owning it), and I found your instructions very helpful! I have a bunch of audio files on my computer that I had made by taking the .wav off of a video file and converting it to mp3 format (instant radio show!), and thanks to you I have managed to make my ipod recognize them as audiobooks. Yay! My only problem is that, in addition to showing up in the audiobooks folder, they also show up in the general “music” list. This might be a silly question, but is there any way I can make them go away? There’s nothing more mood-breaking than running into 45 minutes of dialog in the middle of your shuffled music.

Thanks! ~* Laura

By: Karl Junker

Karl Junker — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:34:29 +0000

Comments on
a) Linda: the “audiobook” section is something which is pre-set in the iPod. Go to iPod settings and enable the “audiobooks” section there. Mind you: only audiobooks dowloaded from Audible will be shown there. If you rip audiobooks from a CD (either .mp3 or .aac), even if you categorize them as “audiobook” or “audiobooks”, they will NOT show up there. They will show up in the respective “audiobook” or “audiobooks” genre list however.

b) Sam: Joining tracks after the CD is already ripped into .mp3 or .aac files which are now residing on your harddisk is not possible in iTunes. iTunes can only join tracks when ripping them from CD. The freeware approach to merge .mp3 files is to use Audacity, however this is tedious I think (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). The most convenient alternative is Markable, not freeware though (http://www.ipodsoft.com/index.php?/software/markable)

c) Bykks and Jim: The most convenient piece of software to rename/relabel Audiobooks descriptions and filenames is the free Windows software mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html). This can do a lot of scripting and by using Excel and CVS/Text files cleverly you can automate the relabelling of files/descriptions/filenames a lot. The procedure I employ when ripping audiobooks to iPod: a) rip with iTunes, b) drag the folder out of iTunes to some other location on the harddrive & delete the items from iTunes c) relabel fields/album/filenames using mp3tag, c) re-import into iTunes from the harddrive.

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 03:00:57 +0000

The info regarding audiobooks is very helpful.
I am converting vinyl records to multi-track MP3s. The end result is a file sturcture that MP3 devices support and mimics the sturcture iTunes creates when you tell it to rip a CD to MP3.
Now, I would like iTunes to import my files to it’s library. The problem is that they are imported as “Track 01”, “Track 02”, etc., ignoring that folder (artist)->subfolder (album)->track names(01 xyz.mp3, 02 yyy.mp3 …) that I have already created. There must be a better way than to re-type the data that already exists into iTunes!
Thanks,
Jim

By: Bykks

Bykks — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 02:38:59 +0000

My problem is that I have books that I have downloaded from the cds in mp3 format. This means I have a folder with 9 files with names like cd1, etc. The problem is that when I try to use them in Itunes, it does not recognize the folders,and wants to play all track 1’s first(each cd starting with track 1) I know I can rename the filenames, but there are hundreds of them in some books, and if I make separate playlists for each cd, I can’t get them to play automatically in sequence. Other than burning audio cds and re-importing them as in another tutorial, is there some better solution to my problem? Thanks for any info, this site has been very informative.

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 14:51:09 +0000

This is nice but if your mp3 audio book from the CD is split into 3 minute segments you get 100-300 tracks all 3 minutes long. What is the purpose to bookmark a 3 minute segment. Do you know of a way to join the aac files to one track after they are already in itunes?

By: Book Blogger

Book Blogger — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 03:23:09 +0000

I think the solution to all of the above is http://www.kitabe.com. They have the lowest rental price in North America – can you believe, $9.95 per month for unlimited audiobooks! Best of all, they have complete unabridged audiobooks in MP3-CD format, no more ripping, no more buying, just listen & drop it off in mail. I have an MP3 player in my car and I can carry an entire book on 1 MP3-CD, and it is unsafe to stick iPOD earphones in the ear and drive. Kitabe.com’s customer service is pretty good too. One of my MP3-CD’s took more than 4 days and when I sent an email, they sent a new one, with no questions asked. Go ahead and give it a try.

By: Linda McK

Linda McK — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 02:08:43 +0000

Help. I want to use audible.com and have purchased a subscrition. I can down load the books to itunes but they go into the music section and I can’t really tell what’s there. Is there a way to download from audible.com onto my ipod. Also, there use to be a category on the ipod that was “audiobooks” but in my attempts to fix it I have deleted it. Do you know how I can get it back.
Sorry to sound so ignorant but about downloading to an ipod I am! Thanks for the help.

By: Jonesin

Jonesin — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 15:32:09 +0000

Problem #1: not enough selection
Solution: Simply Audiobooks

Problem #2: laborious file/format transfers
Solutions: Simply Audiobooks

It’s like Netflix, but for audio books, you can rip disks to MP3 players, then send ‘em back. Shipping can be a bitch sometimes, but it’s still worth my $25 every month. Audible was a decent deal when I first tried them, but it got to be too much of my time, which kinda outweighed the low(ish) price.