It covers the most basic information about how to sync audio from iTunes to your iPod or iPhone, but that’s often the best place to start when you have sync problems. For more advanced syncing settings specific to audiobooks, see my article “Managing audiobooks on a small-capacity iPod”:/audiobooks/itunes/managing-audiobooks-on-a-small-capacity-ipod/.

• Longer audiobook parts, 18 hours instead of the prior 12 hour limit.
• New options for where to break an audiobook into parts; for me, this means no more chapters split across separate parts.
• A number of new build options that allow you to change the settings right before you build the audiobook.
  

There’s other changes and fixes. A nice (free) update to an already very good audiobook tool.

Best-selling, critically acclaimed, and classic authors and stories are represented. The Louis L’Amour story is dramatized (think old time radio), the rest are performed by professional narrators. These are quality products, and a short but complete story in audio format is a great way to try audiobooks, if you’ve never given them a shot before.

Here’s the complete list of what’s available:

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• Merrano of the Dry Country by Louis L’Amour
• “Ysrael,” an unabridged story from Drown by Junot Diaz
• “Truth or Dare,” an unabridged story from The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg
• “Fathers,” an unabridged story from The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• “Great Day,” an unabridged story from Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
• “Best New Horror” by Joe Hill, a story from the collection 20th Century Ghosts
• “Super Goat Man,” an unabridged story from Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem
• “The Babysitter’s Code,” from the collection Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman

The process for downloading them is a little painful, you have to add each one to your shopping cart, and then check out. The check out process requires you to fill in payment information, even though the purchase is free. (I imagine that’s the trade: you create an account with us, and we’ll give you something for free.) After you check out, you’ll receive an email with download instructions, which includes requiring you to install the Overdrive Media Console, a tool to download and manage your electronic purchases from B&N (Amazon has a similar tool), and then going back to the Barnes & Noble site to download the link files, and then opening the link files in Media Console to actually download the tracks. Then if you want them in iTunes, that’s another step. All in all, it’s nowhere near as easy as the iTunes Store, or Audible, or even Amazon. But did I mention the audiobooks are free?

The offer ends on May 16th (at 3am Eastern; call it the 15th for most people), so get there soon.

So why would someone prefer lots of tiny tracks? The common thread seemed to be wanting to have the ability to skip backwards in the book just a couple minutes, if they missed something, got interrupted, or otherwise needed to re-listen to what they had just heard. The easiest way to do this is the iPod’s most obvious track navigation technique, click the Back button once to skip backwards to the beginning of the current track, or click twice to go back to the previous track. While smaller tracks make that reasonable, the hour+ tracks that come out of my audiobook import process make that technique painful. Hence a preference for shorter tracks.

But! The iPod provides at least two other easy-to-use techniques for going backwards in your audiobook, and once mastered, they are at least as useful as the basic clicking, eliminating the need to click backwards through short tracks to re-listen to the last few minutes. And they work best on the long tracks I prefer. Everybody wins!

The first and easiest technique is the same on both classic scroll wheel iPods and the newer touch screen iPods and iPhones. It is ridiculously simple: instead of clicking the back button, hold down the back button (on the scroll wheel for classic iPods, on the track playback screen of a touch model). Where a single click will send you all the way back to the beginning of the track, holding it down will skip backwards in 5 and 10 second increments, gradually increasing in speed the longer you hold down the button. Release when you think you’ve backed up far enough. Voilà!

The second technique is called “scrubbing,” and it works very differently on scroll wheel iPods than it does on a touch screen model. It’s one of the few things that works better on the older style iPods than on the newer, because the scroll wheel is a better surface to work it on.

Once you’ve mastered it, it’s straightforward, but while you’re practicing, I recommend putting playback on pause, to allow you to concentrate. (That’s not part of the required sequence, you can scrub directly on a playing audiobook, too.) Here’s how it works:

1. Click the center button once. Your progress meter will change slightly, from a “thermometer” that fills up as you progress through the track, to a bar with a diamond in the middle, showing where you are in the track.
2. With the diamond showing, start scrolling around the scroll wheel with your thumb or finger, backwards to rewind, forwards to fast forward. You should see the diamond moving, and the time display changing. Stop scrolling when you’re where you think you want to be.

If you see (and hear!) the volume changing, you’ve not actually clicked into scrub mode. Click twice more to change to scrub mode, and then try #2 again.

The longer you scroll, the faster you progress. You can back up through hours of audio in just a few seconds. It takes a bit of practice to get it, but once you do, you’ll find this is invaluable when listening to books, and one of the best things the iPod does for audiobook listeners.

On touch screen iPods and iPhones, there is no scroll wheel. Instead, on the track playback screen, you simply touch the dot on the progress meter, and drag it backwards and forwards. This sounds easier than switching to scrub mode and using the scroll wheel, it’s more direct. But it’s also a lot less precise, and gets less precise the longer your tracks are. On the ~12 hour tracks I aim for on longer books, the shortest increment I can skip is 15 seconds, and that’s if I’m very, very careful. Jumping around by minutes is much more likely, and if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to back up an hour or two. The scroll wheel scrub is much more precise, because circling around on the wheel gives you adjustable (virtual) length depending on track length, while the touch based progress meter is a fixed two inches, no matter the length of the track.

Indeed, scrubbing on a touch model is sufficiently irritating that it was only when I had an iPhone that I ever learned about holding down the back button to skim backwards through a track. (It works a lot better for my most common case, where I just need to skip back 10-15 seconds to listen to something I missed.) So don’t feel bad if you didn’t know about either of these navigation techniques, they’re not obvious, and even the “experts” don’t know everything!

But the options provided by the iPod is not that great, just “Slower”, “Normal”, and “Faster”. Not a lot of control, and the speed change isn’t huge, in either direction. (And I find that it adds a nearly imperceptible but irritating clipping to speech). If you want to make an even bigger speed change, you need to turn to third-party tools that can process the tracks, and then sync the processed versions to your iPod or iPhone.

This is probably worth it only in extreme cases (how I would have loved it for The Grapes of Wrath in high school), but it’s up to you. On the Mac there are a couple options that I know of:

• AudioLobe
• The Amazing Slow-Downer (only slows down)

I don’t know the options for Windows as well, except for the cross-platform applications:

• The Amazing Slow-Downer

Please note these are not endorsements or recommendations, just pointers. If you have any suggestions, for either list, please send them to me!

The Motivation

But before seeing the tedious steps, here’s the why of it. Audiobooks processed as I do below are easier to organize and navigate, and they behave the way I want them to, instead of behaving as individual tracks.

For example, in iTunes Grid view, each audiobook’s tracks are grouped into a single item:

Similarly, in List view with the Artwork column shown, the audiobook tracks are correctly grouped together:

But where my “perfect” audiobooks really shine is on my iPhone (the interface is the same on the iPod Touch). The audiobook appears as one entry in the Audiobooks section of the iPod application, with three “episodes,” and clicking on it displays those episodes:

When playing back the audiobook I see almost full screen cover art, or chapter art if there is any:

And perhaps best of all, clicking on the list icon (top right, just under the battery indicator) displays the chapter list, making navigation through the book a breeze. Just tap on a chapter to start playing back right there:

(Unfortunately, the “classic” iPods, even the latest ones, don’t handle audiobooks as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch. Mostly, it shows every track for an audiobook as an entry in the Audiobooks menu, which can be hundreds of items long, a major pain. But you can at least reduce the pain by consolidating a book down to a track or two, as described here.)

The Process

I started with the CDs of an audiobook, specifically, the 20 CDs for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows read by the magnificent Stephen Fry:

I use an application called Audiobook Builder, which is unfortunately available only for the Mac. There are audiobook importing applications for Windows, but none that I’ve seen give you both ease of use and the amount of control that Audiobook Builder does.

I create a new project, using custom settings that provide a reasonable trade-off between audio quality and disk space (these settings approximate my recommended settings for importing audiobooks in iTunes):

After pasting in the cover art on the first screen, the initial import of the CDs happens in the Chapters panel. This is accomplished by repeatedly clicking the Import CD button, and sticking in the next CD. 20 times for 20 CDs. This takes a while.

The result is a chapters list where each chapter is composed of the tracks from a single CD, which does not correspond to the actual chapters in the book. In the case of the Harry Potter books, the initial chapters list is wildly incorrect (no screenshot for this stage, sorry), and the process of correctly grouping them is tedious, especially if the imported tracks didn’t get useful names applied to them when looked up in the Gracenote CDDB database — which will be the case for most audiobooks. In those cases, I literally play the start of every track, listening for the chapter announcements, because I want proper chapters:

Most audiobooks don’t have chapter art, or at least, don’t have chapter art that I make an effort to preserve. The Harry Potter books are different (and I’m an OCD anal-retentive type), so I painstakingly collected artwork and sequence information from various web sites, and pasted graphics into the chapter art box, at the bottom right of the above screen, for each chapter.

Finally, it’s time to build the audiobook. While this can be a single click operation…

…my preference is to build audiobook files as long as possible, but to have all tracks in a single audiobook be approximately the same. Also, Audiobook Builder limits you to tracks no longer than 12 hours. So, there’s math involved, dividing the audiobook into equal chunks no longer than 12 hours, and then fiddling with Audiobook Builder’s Maximum Track Length preference to set the desired track length:

This really shouldn’t be necessary, and if the developers of Audiobook Builder would like some advice, I would suggest that rather than a manual setting (which I have to tweak for every audiobook), this setting should be a choice between “Make parts which are no longer than xxx” (with the slider controlling xxx), and “Make all parts approximately the same length.” And there should be an additional setting, “Do not break chapters across parts.” I hate that, and currently it’s nearly inevitable in books with long chapters.

Once I click the Build Audiobook button, I sit back and wait for the audiobook tracks to get joined together, artwork embedded, etc. Eventually the book is built, and automatically added to iTunes. In iTunes I do one last step, using File > Get Info to set the Media Kind and some playback options:

OK! Done! Sync to my iPhone, and away I go!

Advanced Steps

OK, as if the above steps were not enough work, for some books, I add another, really painful step in the middle. Namely, when a book has chapters that break across CDs, there’s usually an audible intro on the next CD, something like “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, disk four. Chapter seven, continued.” Useful for people who are swapping CDs to listen, but useless on an iPhone, where I have 12 hour tracks. So, for books I really want “perfect,” I will actually edit the audio tracks with the CD intros, using Rogue Amoeba’s Fission:

(Hard to tell in the screenshot, but I’ve selected the intro audio, and the mouse is hovering over the Remove button.) Yes, this is a pain in the butt. No, it’s not worth it. Yes, I have to do it, for some books…

But the best source for audiobook releases news I’ve found are the RSS feeds offered by Audible.com. They have feeds for the latest releases, but they also have feeds for best sellers from various lists (NYTimes, etc.), best sellers in various categories, and feeds for specially priced titles, including free content. Audible’s feeds used to be awful, abbreviated entries that were almost useless. But at some point they got a whole lot better, and now tell you the book title, author, and give the full description for the book. They even link to an audio sample of the book, for you to listen to before you buy. Since Audible has the largest catalog of audiobooks, this is about as comprehensive a source as you can find.

Unfortunately, while I would like to link directly to Audible’s feeds page, their horrible web site makes it impossible to directly link to some pages, including that one. So I can only describe how to navigate there yourself.

1. Start at the Audible.com home page.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
3. Click the “RSS” link, which looks like this:

Find a feed that appeals to you, and subscribe to it in your usual newsreader, e.g., Google Reader, NewsGator’s excellent readers, etc. (If you don’t know what a newsreader or RSS feed is, this What is RSS? article is a pretty good introduction.)

It’s not clear to me how OverDrive protects the downloaded content, enforces lending period constraints, or otherwise restricts the use of audiobooks downloaded using their system. Some of the instructions and FAQs make it sound a little cumbersome, and generally content producers (the audiobook publishers) require pretty strong restrictions. So I’m a little hesitant to install the new software on my computer (I really need to get a test system…), fearing some hidden DRM kernel extension, or other invasive software.

It’s also not clear to me how much content is available to the new Media Console, at least in the MP3 format supported for Mac users. The older WMA format is much more broadly enabled, as it includes DRM restrictions that publishers are comfortable with. But you can search OverDrive’s national directory of libraries and see if content is available from a library or other source near you.

If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you. Otherwise, I’ll try to give it a whirl in the new year, and post an updated then.