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…

Audiobook Builder gets my rave review for three reasons:

1. It’s easy to use
2. It saves a lot of time
3. The final product is superior

The only real “problem” with it is that it is for Mac OS X only.

Update: Audibook Builder was recently reviewed as a Mac Gem by Macworld, and received a 4½ mouse rating.

Easy to Use

If you’ve followed, or even read, my instructions for how to import Audio CD audiobooks into iTunes, you know that the process of importing a series of CDs which are all connected, and which need to be played back in strict order, is a cumbersome task that involves a lot of steps: disc swapping, settings changes, and fiddling with file extensions and iTunes meta data. It’s painful, and only the desire to have a good book on your iPod keeps you going.

Except for some set-and-forget options to configure the first time you use Audiobook Builder, the process of importing a new audiobook is a sequence of three steps, two of which are dead simple, and the “hard” one is straightforward.

Audiobook Builder deals with all the complexities of audibooks for iTunes and the iPod behind the scenes. This means that it is easy to import audiobooks correctly, every time, and without painstaking attention to detail.

Saves Time

My manual process requires a few steps before and after importing a disc, which are repeated for each disc or track imported. This can take quite a while, because there is a wait of up to 10 minutes per disc while it’s being imported. The attention to detail required to get correct results (due to the finicky behavior of iTunes and the iPod with regards to audiobooks) means that it can be hard to multi-task while you’re doing it. So importing an audiobook from CDs, especially if it’s a long book, can take a fair amount of time. For me, a 10+ disc book is going to take 30-45 minutes of time, minimum. This adds up if you are importing books regularly, to feed a 2 hour daily commute.

With Audiobook Builder, there’s still the amount of time it takes to import and encode the audio tracks from the CDs; that remains constant. But most of the other tedious steps are eliminated, and so the amount of attention required drops by 90%. By comparison to the example above, the same audiobook takes me about 5-10 minutes of actual effort, most of which is looking for cover art on Amazon.com. That’s a huge difference for me.

Superior Results

But the real value of Audiobook Builder may be in the results. In contrast to my manual method, the books that come out of Audiobook Builder:

• Are one or two continuous tracks, not a series of tracks, one for each disc in the audiobook.
• Have chapter marks placed wherever you want them; by default, at the disc boundaries, i.e., about every hour or so.
• Always appear in the Audiobook menu in iTunes and on the iPod.

The number one question readers ask me is How do I get an imported book to appear in the Audiobooks menu?, and problems with playback or list order are also frequent. Using Audiobook Builder pretty much eliminates all of those issues. And by reducing the number of tracks required for a single audiobook (down to just one for a 12-hour or shorter book), it makes organizing in iTunes far simpler, and finding and playing back on an iPod far easier.

Limitations

Although Audiobook Builder is terrific, it’s not (yet) perfect. In particular:

• The window for organizing tracks into chapter groupings can be hard to use, until you understand it. I figured it out by making a bunch of mistakes. Unfortunately…
• There is no Undo for mistakes you make when organizing tracks into chapters. Correcting a mistake can take a fair amount of work, up to and including starting over.
• I would like an auto-feed-and-eject mode for adding discs, like iTunes provides for importing stacks of music CDs.
• I would like more control over where to split long audiobooks; splitting at a fixed number of hours can leave you with one long part, and one very short part, when the book is not much longer than the part limit setting. (I expect this would be for advanced users only.)

With regard to the first two limitations, they sound like a big deal but they are not. Audiobook Builder’s default behavior and grouping is usually fine. It’s only when you want to obsessively get every chapter just so (hello Harry Potter fans!) that this can be a problem. I have only fiddled with 2-3 books so far, out of 10-12 that I’ve imported with Audiobook Builder, and only because I’m anal retentive particular about some things.

Recommendation

Obviously, I think that Audiobook Builder is an outstanding tool. Reading the support forum and exchanging email with Splasm Software, I understand that it will get even better, reducing or eliminating my caveats above. But even today, at version 1.0.6, Audiobook Builder is a terrific piece of software that is well worth your $10.

Let me be even more clear. You should definitely buy Audiobook Builder if:

• You import audiobooks from CDs regularly (no matter where you get the audiobooks, library, Kitabe.com, etc.). I would define “regularly” as twice a month or more.
• You value your time, and spending time in front of your Mac fussing with CDs and iTunes is not your idea of fun. (This is especially true if you bill by the hour, and spend time importing CDs instead of working. cough)
• You’re anal retentive particular about the organization of your iTunes collection, especially your audiobooks.

If any of these are true about you, you should get Audiobook Builder. If all of them are true (welcome brother!), then today the clouds will part and the sun shine brightly down upon you. I.e., what are you waiting for? Go buy it now!

Summary

Audiobook Builder by Splasm Software.

Requirements

• Mac OS X 10.4 or later
• QuickTime 7 or later

Audiobook Builder is a universal binary and works on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. There is no Windows version, nor does Splasm Software have one planned.

Pricing

• $9.95 for a single user license
• $14.95 for a family pack

Disclaimer

I paid for my Audiobook Builder license, and I don’t get any referral fees or other kickbacks from Splasm Software. I just like the product, a lot.

(I do get affiliate payments for Audible.com and Amazon.com; but Audible.com could be seen as an alternative/competitor to Audiobook Builder.)

My initial suspicion, based solely on looking at the screenshots, is that it may be a little complicated if your needs are simple. For myself, I usually only want to merge entire CDs into chapters, which iTunes does if you use the Advanced > Join Tracks command, and then join those into a whole book, with chapter marks and full audiobook format and metadata, which Join Together does quite ably, and very simply.

In any event, I’ll be giving Audiobook Builder a try in the near future, and I’ll post a full review then, but in the meantime, I wanted to point to it, and see what other people think.