Aldoblog

iTunes and the iPod were built to work together, and work together beautifully. And iTunes and audiobooks also go together well. Just ask Apple. But if you stick to Apple’s information, you’ll find little about audiobooks except for those you can buy in the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) — a great option, with a seamless experience, but it does get expensive.

If you start to acquire audiobooks from different sources, especially on Audio CD or MP3 format CDs, you may find that the experience of using those audiobooks is not nearly as seamless as those from the iTMS or Audible.com. In particular, you may have difficulty convincing iTunes and the iPod that your imported discs are really audiobooks.

Uh, what?

There are two “levels” of being an audiobook (at least according to iTunes and iPods). The “basic” level means that the audiobook’s tracks show up in Genres > Audiobook section of your iPod; that the tracks are bookmarkable, that is, your iPod will remember where you stopped listening, and pick up at the same place when you come back; and that the audiobook tracks are skipped when you’re in music shuffle-play mode. This basic level of being an audiobook is fairly easy to achieve.

But basic level audiobooks will not appear in an iPod’s top-level Audiobooks menu, nor will they be listed when you select the Audiobooks item in the iTunes source list. This is because iTunes and iPods have a very specific idea of what an audiobook is, and to get tracks to show up in the expected places, they need to “look” a certain way to iTunes and the iPod, which requires extra steps, or tools besides iTunes.

The instructions I’ve provided for importing audiobooks from Audio CD and from MP3 CD explain what the minimum level of effort is, and how to achieve “full” audiobook status. You can decide what’s more important to you: a little bit of time, or having your audiobooks work perfectly in iTunes and on your iPod. (Personally, I go for perfect.)