February 2009 Archives

In the last seven days I seem to have seen a lot of music, although I did pay the price just a little.

Last Sunday I went to The Junction in Cambridge to watch Bellowhead. Just to be clear, I don't live in Cambridge, so it was a bit of a trip to see them. But The Junction's just near the station, and depending on when they finished, I knew I'd be able to get back to London in time.

Foolishly, as it turns out, I had a pizza while I was there. Or perhaps it was the salad. Anyway, it had implications.

If you've never seen Bellowhead, then you really need to. Yes, they're a folk band, but there are eleven of them (so buy their albums: think how much they must have to split the proceeds!) and they play a very upbeat version of folk. Sometimes the songs they sing can be a bit bawdy. The previous night they'd played at the Royal Festival Hall, but it had been sold out being Valentines' Day, and we were told that some of their songs that night had been quite rude.

This was more family friendly fare, which was just as well as people do bring their kids along to Bellowhead (again - the previous day in London, they'd done a free kids concert in the Festival Hall earlier in the day).

Jon Boden is the charismatic lead singer, but everyone else just seems to love appearing on-stage, and they bounce around with excitement and play their incredible array of instruments with complete joy.

According to their Wikipedia entry, the band themselves describe their music thus:

"Merging a joyous, uplifting cacophony of sound with a slightly sinister, distorted collision of music hall, Lotte Lenya, Robert Wyatt and pure theatre."

Curiously, midway through the concert, a girl collapsed near me for the second time in a week. I know what you're thinking. It's not that. The previous Monday, at a speaker at a presentation had passed out and collapsed against the wall behind her. This time, it was a woman behind me who basically fell into me. I think it was a small fit, and she had her mum (I think) to hand to help her up. She stayed on for the rest of the fantastic gig.

As I say, there were ramifications of that pizza meal, and let's just say that I had a very unpleasant trip home, and didn't sleep a great that night or much the next day. And I wasn't in a rush to eat anything.

The second concert was with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank. This concert was called Music and Chance, and was a very strange affair indeed. The highlight was a new composition receiving its premiere featuring precisely one minute of music from each of twelve composers. These people had randomly placed in two groups of six with each composing their minute with only the very end of the previous piece available to them. So effectively we had two six minute pieces.

The composers varied from the Pet Shop Boys (receiving their Brit the following evening) and Anne Dudley, to Will Gregory (of Goldfrapp) and Andy Sheppard. I think it's fair to say that you could hear where the breaks between composers were.

Charles Hazelwood, who talked us through procedings, also gave us a couple of variations of Mozart's Music Dice Game, with one version determined by audience members rolling dice (essentially the dice roll determines which of a 176 one-bar phrases, the orchestra plays).

Also on the programme was the remarkable "In C" for which Hazelwood left the podium and the orchestra played by itself. Although the duration is indeterminate due to the rules of the piece, I got the feeling that some kind of agreement had been reached in advance. It works astonishingly well however.

The whole concert was recorded for Radio 3, although I can't yet tell exactly when it's going out.

Finally, I was very lucky and got a last-minute ticket to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct the Philharmonia for Mozart's Piano Concerto 17 (with Emmanuel Ax) and then Mahler's Symphony No. 5. This second piece, in particular is immense and lasts some 70 minutes. But Dudamel is an incredible conducting force and throws himself into it. Of course he knows the piece backwards and has recorded it.

At the end of it, he got a rapturous standing ovation, and the applause lasted several minutes. He's back in the country later in the year with his beloved Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, but sadly this is well and truly sold out already.

Anyway, glorious stuff, and a concert that will live long in my memory.

This Wednesday, ITV2 launches that rarest of things, a new sitcom. Actually, that's a bit unfair, as ITV has been commissioning a reasonable amount of programming for ITV2. It's just that most of it really doesn't interest me.

But this week there's something that I am looking forward to - FM. Indeed, if you head over to ITV's site, you can watch a preview of the first episode.

It's not too bad with The IT Crowd's Chris O'Dowd playing a DJ alongside Kevin Bishop, who plays his co-host, and was a one-time boyband member.

If Skin FM, the radio station portrayed, doesn't look too much like your local radio station, that's because it won't. There really aren't any radio stations like those you see on TV. Skin FM is evidently modelled on Xfm - well Xfm before Capital (and now Global) took it over.

But sitcoms are more about the characters and a DJ who can't mix but decides to fake it with a mix CD is not really that far from the truth at all (so I hear).

As ITV's trying to be edgy with this show, there's lots of swearing, and a bit of sex too. And we get a few cameos: the first episode features The Guillemots, Justin Hawkins (ex-Darkness) and Marianne Faithful! And we're promised that there are more to come. They add, I suppose, a hint of Larry Sanders to proceedings.

I suppose the most disappointing thing about it, is not what was on-air, but the quote from producer Izzy Mant in last week's Broadcast (NB. Quote isn't in the online piece):

"When I first came across this project I thought: why hasn't anyone done a sitcom set in a music radio station before?"

Umm. They have.

As I mentioned a while back when this series was announced, the UK's seen Kit Curran and The Lenny Henry Show (the sitcom incarnation). And they're both British!

And possibly more famous than either of those was WKRP in Cincinatti.

They're just the shows set in music radio stations. There've been others set in non-music radio stations: Frasier immediately springs to mind. And radio comedies like Radio Active or even On The Hour.

Indeed, of all occupations featured in sitcoms, radio has definitely had more than its fair share.

That shouldn't detract from FM, but let's not forget our heritage shall we?

As I said at the start of this piece, it's always entertaining to see your place of work featured in fiction, and invariably it's not accurate. A couple of weeks ago Radio 3's The Wire had a play by Mark Lawson entitled The Number of the Dead. This was set in an un-named news studio and featured Tim McInnery as Timothy Freeman, a slightly jaded news presenter with his much younger co-host. Suddenly a breaking news story begins to impact on his life personally.

Now Mark Lawson obviously has a good idea about how radio studios work (he frequently presents Front Row in between his otherwise gargantuan workload), but in this instance you felt that he was like a cook presented with a rack of herbs and spices, trying to desperately shoehorn all of them into a recipe.

So we had lots of lingo that those "in the biz" would probably recognise. But it was all just a little forced. His producer was rude and offensive to his wife, when if there's one thing we all know about producers, and that's that they don't upset the talent. And the character was just that bit too jaded.

What was really more entertaining was trying to work out who Lawson might be basing this story on. With talk of studios like "C7" it could only be the BBC since even the largest commercial operator has a relatively finite number of studios and usually names in a sensible scheme: "A, B, C..." or "1, 2, 3..."

There really is no commercial news station with the exception of LBC, and Radio 4 doesn't do long news programmes that continually ask for emails and texts. So it must be Five Live that he's thinking of. And the obvious show there would be Five Live Drive with Peter Allen and Anita Arnand. But I don't really think Peter Allen behaves like McInnery's character!

(I'd love to post the mp3 of this, since we're long after the iPlayer window, but I'd probably be shot).

At least we have series two of Moving Wallpaper to look out for on Friday. Not content with generally showing off on QI on Friday, Ben Miller's back as his wonderfully awful TV producer Jonathan Pope. This time, he's without the dreadful Echo Beach which I stopped watching after one episode (either you believe in a soap or you don't), and we have a seemingly non-broadcast zombie series instead.

Radio 4 has a new Science Fiction season, and the TV trailer is wonderfully creepy:

(Actually, I think it's already been edited a little since this version was launched. Or maybe they have a pre-watershed version.)

Have I mentioned before that I hate the Brits? Well - yes I have.

Having studiously avoided them for several years now (despite working for a music radio station), I decided to watch this year simply because the Pet Shop Boys are getting the award for Outstanding Contribution to Music.

But this is dire.

I suppose at least they're not recording to a show a day after the event - as far as I can gather, it's only on a relatively short delay. But in no particular order, here are the things I hate about the Brits based on this evening's show:

#1 The screaming Brits school kids
#2 Winners seemingly knowing that they'll win (Katy Perry came off her sickbed because she was told she should), and betting closed in one category earlier today
#3 Tables of indifferent record company execs and assorted hangers on (£7500 a table folks) waiting for the after-parties
#4 Strange pauses in procedings (does nobody rehearse this stuff?)
#5 Constant screaming
#6 Fearne Cotton
#7 Way more presenters than need be
#8 The public voting winners
#9 The record industry divvying up the winners
#10 Unnecessary costume changes
#11 Unfunny presenter scripts
#12 Lawyers getting to vote winners (Yes - really. The voiceover women said so)
#13 Big name in music, Jamie Oliver
#14 The screaming
#15 Unfunny pre-recorded winners' clips (e.g. Paul Weller)
#16 Fearne Cotton's interviewing technique seemingly carried out in an empty aircraft hanger. Can you hear the echo - echo - echo?
#17 ...and from mobiles will be considerably more... (What type of phones do you think people most likely to vote for this award will have?)
#18 God - the screaming never stops...
#19 Going behind the scenes to interview the presenter before he or she has gone on to present.
#20 Americans thinking England = UK (but still being far more professional than anybody else)
#21 No on-screen captions. How am I suppose to know who the idiots in the Logan's Run jumpsuits on the Close Encounters spaceship are supposed to be? Yes... I guessed.
#22 Laboured video gags (again... I quite liked the fact that Iron Maiden are able to win this award, but I bet some producer made them do that at the end)
#23 The idea that Radiohead, Girls Aloud, Take That, Coldplay and Elbow could all compete for the same award ("It's reassuring to know that quality music does get recognised" says voiceover lady. What does that say about the Brits?)
#24 Ashley Cole looking thoroughly bored - actually, I quite liked that.
#25 People standing very much indifferently and chatting while Kings of Leon play - almost certainly not looking at the stage.
#26 Unsure what's more offensive, the "Hoff" being sleazy or the fact that Fearne Cotton's the object of his affections (kudos for knowing/being primed that Elbow have Wembley gigs though)
#27 Hilllllllaaaaarrrrious Craig David gags. They're just brilliant!
#28 The "audio muted" soundtrack
#29 Hilllllllaaaaarrrrious gags from music specialist Gok Wan.
#30 Taking no responsibility for the "commercial radio" part of the British Single award.
#31 Wondering when Tom Jones stopped dying?
#32 Girls Aloud, Gok Wan, Alan Carr and Fearne Cotton all on the screen at the same time...
#33 Did I mention the screaming?
#34 The idea that this is available to buy.
#35 Brandon Flowers was 13 when Discography came out?!?
#36 The many faces of Louis Walsh.
#37 Duffy Diet Coke ads.

In the end, the PSB were pretty good, although perhaps not as awesome as they might have been.

I think it may be another five years until I next watch this, although following it on Twitter's good fun.

If you've never taken part in a phone-in on the radio, you might be surprised how easy it is to get through if you've got something interesting to say.

Listen to "Tony" speaking to Five Live's Victoria Derbyshire on Monday:

And on Sunday night, "Pavinder" called Eddie Nestor on BBC London:

If you happened to be Iain Lee or Matt Lucas you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves.

Of course this has a long history. Peter Cook used to call Clive Bull on LBC under the guise of Sven from Swiss Cottage...

This evening I was invited to a presentation at the BT Tower, followed by a dinner at the top of the tower in their famous revolving restaurant. This is closed to the public, and it was exciting to get a chance to go up there.

Sadly, today probably wasn't the best day to go up.

There was a quickly descending fog which meant significantly reduced visibility, and of course it was pouring with rain too. So the above photo is about the best I got from up there. I couldn't even tell you which direction I was looking in when I took it.

The following photo gives you an idea about just how bad the conditions were.

I must go on the London Eye again at some point, as my sole visit was also on a foggy evening, and you could barely see Big Ben just across the river.

Oh... and the restaurant in the BT Tower did revolve!

And it was all going so well.

Last year the BAFTA awards had the sound messed up for the BBC1 broadcast. There were apologies all around, and we were told that this wasn't because the OB was put together by an independent. We were told that the production team had years of experience.

This year, things looked like they were going well. Coverage ran over three channels for no obvious reason with an hour each on BBC Three, BBC Two and BBC One. I watched the latter two covering the awards.

The whole ceremony is broadcast on a significant delay - presumably to allow time to bleep Mickey Rourke's acceptance speech (and Mick Jagger).

But the real problem came when we saw the Terry Gilliam montage sequence as he was inducted into the academy was just appalling. It looked like an early edit had been used, as we saw repeated clips and sequences of clips. It was clear that nobody had watched the final edit all the way through at the end. Given that the one thing we knew before the evening was that Gilliam would definitely be winning, this particular montage could have been edited weeks ago.

But instead it looked like they'd given it to the work experience kid.

It was an embarrassment.

Gilliam came on and made his acceptance. He got out a long piece of paper and threatened to thank all the "little guys" beginning with those from Time Bandit. Now I don't know how far down the list he made it, but there was a clunky edit as he suddenly ended his speech with a thanks and left. Again, very poor production.

As is traditional, we then began had a round up of the awards that didn't make it into the two hour broadcast (BBC Three's coverage was red carpet stuff). So we had the winners of the Best Short, etc.

As we watched Nick Park accepted for Short Animation, who let's face it, is much loved by British audiences, the credits rolled right over the top. This was obviously for timing purposes, but it was awful. And given that we were only a minute over the 10pm scheduled finish, nobody would have minded a very short over-run.

After Nick Park, we had the editing award for Slumdog Millionaire and had credits running over credits as the winner accepted his award. Then the same happened for Animated Film (Wall-E). Then we had the transition music and we just cut to an end credit as the broadcast ended.

I think we got to see all the awards, casting an eye over the official winners' list, but it was complete amateur hour. Absolutely dreadful.

These awards are broadcast internationally and it really did not reflect well on Whizz Kid Entertainment who co-produced the awards with BAFTA for the BBC.

How about next year we get the awards live - or at least on a very short delay for the potty-mouthed likes of messrs. Rourke and Jagger. Run it on one channel, and if it over-runs, then it over-runs. Award ceremonies make a habit of that, although at least unlike the Oscars, the BAFTAs cut to the chase without silly interludes.

(PS Why does the BBC correspondent in Sydney this evening look like he's talking down the line on Skype? For a major story like that in Australia, surely a satellite feed should be used?)

In today's Observer there's a Sky ad that reads:

"Want to watch Sky Sports live on your PC?"

Then there's a picture of a laptop showing some Premier League football.

"Now you can with Sky Player."

Hmm. I've heard that claim before. Yes you can, as long as you subscribe to Sky Multiroom (i.e. pay for an additional box on the same subscription - usually to put in a different room in your home), or Sky Broadband Max (i.e. take their phone and broadband package too).

So I looked closely at the ad. Perhaps they've changed their terms?

"PC with Microsoft Windows XP/Vista or Intel based Mac with minimum 2Mb broadband connection required."

That's all fine...

"Some programmes are unavailable to show online (see sky.com/skyplayer)."

Understandable. Some programming will sell its online rights seperately.

"On demand content outside of your subscription will cost extra."

That seems reasonable. But I subscribe to Sky Sports.

"Movies and entertainment to download are unavailable to Mac users."

They use a Microsoft DRM system.

"Information only applies to residential customers in the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. Further terms apply."

The devil's in the detail.

"Further terms apply."

I log on to Sky Player, and of course I can't watch the football online, although since I'm sitting in front of my TV, I can watch it there. Sky's not changed its terms. As I live on my own, I'm not likely to buy multiroom, and as I'm happy with my broadband and telecom providers, I'm not buying their full package.

There are free programmes that I can watch. Lost and 24 are good examples. But even then, I'm forced to download rather than stream programmes. If the BBC iPlayer's shown us one thing, it's that streaming's pretty popular.

This is interesting to watch, and perhaps shows how if you're not careful, things will run away from you.

Ben Goldacre, the writer of The Guardian's Bad Science column and author of the very excellent Bad Science book, wrote about a programme broadcast by LBC presented by Jenni Barnett.

I'll say up front that I think Goldacre's work is excellent and important with the media regularly misusing and abusing science to make a good headline or story. Seriously - get his book and read about them yourself.

Goldacre is undoubtedly especially upset by the mis-reporting of MMR and the whole nonsense that came out of it. The media scare stories naturally did just that - scare parents into not having the vaccination.

Only today comes news that the rise in measles in the UK is "very worrying." The cases reported are disproportionately high in London (where LBC broadcasts incidentally), and the blame is squarely being laid at the now discredited research linking MMR with autism. So it's a matter of public health that false stories aren't perpetuated.

To illustrate his piece, he uploaded a long piece of audio lifted from the show, or more probably, someone paid for that edition's podcast and excerpted 44 minutes of the show.

I am not a copyright lawyer, but that's probably not legal*. The copyright in the audio does reside with Global Radio - indeed, beyond the value attained by broadcasting advertising around the programme, there are also podcast revenues derived from sales and subscriptions to LBC's programming.

So cut and dry then? Goldacre shouldn't have re-published the audio.

Well yes, but that's only part of the story. Barnett later apologised on her blog, and Goldacre felt that the full extent of what had been broadcast needed to be understood.

I'm summarising - read the full story here and here.

LBC responded by sending a legal letter. Goldacre took the audio down, although it has since resurfaced elsewhere.

And while LBC, Global and their lawyers are almost certainly entirely within their rights to demand the removal, the net affect at time of writing seems to have been to antagonise a wide ranging web community.

The story was published on the influential, and widely read Boing Boing earlier today, and the traffic from that site actually temporarily brought down the Bad Science site (it's up again now).

I suspect that there may be complaints to Ofcom forthcoming as well.

What do we learn from this? That once lawyers get involved, not everyone just folds. Especially if they've just fought a major case in the High Court against an Aids denier.

And the net result might be a lot of negative comment about your brand, even if you're technically in the right.

--

* From what I can gather, there's the US "fair use" concept does not exist in UK law. We have "fair dealing". In this instance, it'd be within the purvue of "reporting current events".

As a non-lawyer, it's not clear to me in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 what proportion of copyright material might be quoted or broadcast.

Following on from Stephen Colbert's humourous take on public photography in the, there's slightly more distrurbing news in the British Journal of Photography (via Boing Boing).

There are far too many cases of law enforcement officials wrongly stopping members of the public from taking photographs. We don't yet live in a police state.

Via Thomas Hawk / Jack Schofield on the Twitters / and, er, watching The Colbert Report on FX in the UK.

The new issue of Private Eye's Ad Nauseum column highlights the recent BBC 6 Music TV ad which you may have seen, featuring Vampire Weekend on the soundtrack.

(Also available here)

It points out, as the person who uploaded the above version of the ad, that ad agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R were probably, um, inspired by a guy called Blu who created a wonderful film called Mutu:

Anyway, that's not really the radio ad I wanted to talk about.

No.

It's the new Nicky Campbell Five Live ad I wanted to bring up. Here it is, in case you've been unlucky and not yet seen it (the aspect ratio's wrong sadly):

It's dreadful. He's in a studio packed with people (with plenty of diversity) who represent "the nation" and are going to talk about today's "big story". They all put on headphones and instead of talking to one or more of them, or a discussion getting underway, we get "Tom on line 1". Huh?

This is all to promote the strange new Five Live breakfast line-up where Shelagh Fogarty starts at 6am on her own before Nicky Campbell joins her at 7am. Then at 9am, Shelagh leaves and Nicky gets an hour on the phones before at 10am, Victoria Derbyshire takes over on the phones - her show effectively bumped back an hour. That means no more midday news, which is a shame.

Now Campbell's good at phone-ins, and I'm sure that creating a generic ad about a phone-in is difficult, since the very nature of thing means that it has to be about a subject. But this is poor fare indeed. Creatively poor.

Of course I'm not suggesting the creatives responsible trawl the net for ideas however...

--

In other radio news, if you've not already caught the Elbow concert on the red button, do so before it disappear, or watch it here (I know it's embeddable, but it ends on Saturday, whereas this blog doesn't).

And if like me, you enjoy 2ManyDJs aka Soulwax, you've got to listen to last night's Colin Murray show where they sat in. The first hour features 400 intros all mixed together.

And I should also point you to Absolute Radio's videos of Chris Martin - did I mention he came in last week? There'll be four songs in total to see, with a song going up each day this week. At time of writing, there are three to watch already.

Today saw an entirely expected and predicted fall of snow, and just what chaos it caused.

Many tube lines were shut down. Seemingly, most of the rail lines going south from London were shut down. And most appallingly, the entire bus network was shut down.

There wasn't a red bus in London to be caught this morning. I obviously used the opportunity to get up early and take photos. And I should say that despite several inches of snow locally, First Capital Connect kept all their trains running all day, with few hiccups beyond unavoidable delays (drivers tend to need to slow down and start up a bit slower than usual). The conclusion of my trip into work was via the Victoria Line which was the only unaffected line by virtue of the fact that it's entirely underground (So's the Waterloo & City Line, mind you, but that had weather related problems strangely).

Quite why all the buses were off the streets still isn't completely clear to me, and I suspect that in coming days and weeks this won't be the last we hear of this.

It was "unprecedented" we were told. Buses couldn't leave the depots, seemingly.

I just don't buy this. While it might be quite a while since Londoners received quite such a dumping of snow, I remember equally as bad snow when I used to go to school. It lasted a couple of weeks and while buses and traffic in general ran slowly, they kept running. Shutting down virtually the entire public transport network in a major western city is dreadful. I'm not going to lay the blame directly at the feet of Boris, but he has some questions to answer.

Anyway, I did take a few photos, and the rest are over at Flickr.

In a lot of ways iTunes is really very good.

Obviously it's a painless way to purchase music, or convert your CDs to audiofiles for uploading to your iPod. It allows you to sync your library to your portable device relatively painlessly. And I must admit that the new Genius feature isn't too bad (if sometimes a little obvious).

But it's still a ridiculously large download that only seems to get ever bigger with every new device that Apple puts into the marketplace. It seems that this one piece of software should serve everything that portable devices might ever need to do. So frequently is it updated, that you don't even get a CD of the application in the box when you buy an iPod - you're expected to be online and download the latest version.

I'd like to see programmers at Apple have a bottom up rethink of the software and rewrite it. I'm sure that it's just poor code built on poor code.

But that's not really what this piece is about. It's about the poor way that Apple handles audiobooks - especially ones not bought from either them or Audible.

If you do buy either an Audible book or an audiobook from the iTunes store, then it's pretty decent. The book downloads and drops into the appropriate Audiobook section of iTunes (you'll have to turn the View Audiobooks feature on incidentally as by default it's off, and that can lead to confusion about where your purchase has actually gone). The default settings mean that the audiobook won't be included in Shuffle - so you won't segue gently from Bruce Springsteen to a chapter from Moby Dick which might kill the mood a little - and both iTunes and your iPod will remember your position. So no jumping back to the start of a chapter or even the start of a whole play. And on the device itself, you can speed up or slow down playback.

That's fine, as I say, if you buy online from an approved reseller. Indeed Audible books even have chaptering built in that's largely unavailable to other formats of audio. But I don't always want to buy from Audible. Indeed, their sound quality, even at the highest setting, is too close to AM radio for my liking (and I speak as a subcriber).

You might want to rip a CD of a radio series like the recent complete On The Hour series that were released, or you might simply record an mp3 of a radio programme or otherwise.

Of course iTunes is wonderful at handling podcasts, but they're slightly more transient - disposable even - in the way they're handled. iTunes marks "new" episodes of programmes, and allows you to sync just them. The majority, seeking mass usage of their podcasts, use the more common mp3 format, but iTunes happily remembers your position should you need to stop and come back to a podcast.

But let's get back to the non-iTunes store and non-podcast spoken word audio.

It's a complete pain to get into the Audiobooks section of iTunes. First you need to rip in an AAC format. That's fine, but even if you tell iTunes that the genre is Audiobook or similar, that won't be enough. The next step is to manually go to the folder where you're ripped files reside and rename all the files from m4a files to m4b (Incidentally, the tutorials that exist on the web all suggest that you drop AAC encoding to quite a low level like 128 or even 64 kbps. That's fine unless you don't like to hear incidental music in a decent fashion or appreciate the stereo sound effects that might have been employed. Even if you do only have an 8GB iPhone and very limited memory, go for the higher quality).

Once you've manually edited all the file names, you have to reimport them back into iTunes. And then you have to delete the original versions from the library - you'll see small exclamation marks next to the files iTunes can no longer find. Then go into the properties of each of the files and check the boxes to remove them shuffle and to ensure that playback position is recalled.

Why on earth doens't iTunes either handle this automatically when you change to an appropriate genre, or just allow you to do this from a window?

Incidentally, depending on how the CD you're ripping is chaptered, you might want to merge tracks in iTunes before the initial rip.

If you want to make an audiobook from an mp3 that you have, then it's basically the same again. First of all you have to convert your mp3 to AAC because an mp3 just cannot sit in the Audiobooks section for some reason. While this might be economic with space on your device (AAC files commonly being smaller than their equivalent mp3 files), it's another needless conversion.

This ridiculous farrago has been true for at least the last three major versions of iTunes and probably more.

Note to Apple: the audiobook business is growing and not everybody gets their audiobooks from Audible or the iTunes store. Lots of third party suppliers and publishers are offering CDs, MP3-CDs and downloads (again usually in mp3 format), so I know that I'm not the only person jumping through these hoops.

As I say, I like iTunes to an extent and the functionality is excellent, but there's more to audio than music, and Apple needs to remember that as I think it's TV and Apps that it now concentrates on.