iTunes and Audiobooks

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.


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7 responses to “iTunes and Audiobooks”

  1. JF avatar
    JF

    Not sure this is all still true – it used to be, but these days I rip CD audiobooks to MP3 – just ensure the Media Kind on the Info/Options tab for the MP3 files is set to Audiobook. This causes the MP3 files to show up in the Audiobooks section in iTunes.
    You can also set Info/Options – ‘Remember playback position’, ‘Skip when shuffling’, and ‘Part of a gapless album’. These work on current iPod/iPhone versions for MP3 as well as AAC.

  2. Adam Bowie avatar

    Thanks – I will give that another go. But that’s not been my experience so far. The Info/Options parts are true, although ideally it’d be done automatically with anything called Audiobook. (And while I’m at it, Classical wouldn’t show up in Shuffle either).

  3. JF avatar
    JF

    It does depend on the iPod model you’ve got – none of this stuff works on my old white 3G, but works fine in the Touch & iPhone.
    Why don’t you just do a bulk option setting on all your Classical stuff to – ‘Skip when shuffling’. At least that will work until you next import something.
    If you’re on a Mac maybe there are some AppleScripts that could automate some of this?

  4. Adam Bowie avatar

    I’m using the newest version of the iPod Classic so I can’t see why it shouldn’t. And I’m obviously also using the latest version of iTunes.
    The bulk changing of everything in the classical genre is probably not a bad idea.
    I’m on a PC so scripting it is probably not a reality, but I think I should be able to bulk-select everything in the classical genre and change that.
    To be honest, while I’m keen to get album and track names correct, genre is the area I’m least consistant on because it’s never cut and dried what category a particular album or song should go in.

  5. JF avatar
    JF

    I gave up on Genre long ago – it needs to be able to cope with multiple genres intelligently. Most of my stuff these days is in a catch-all Album genre with exceptions for Compilations, Jazz, Classical etc. At least that way I can normally find an album I’m interested in without worrying whether R.E.M. is Rock, Pop, or Alt 😉

  6. Josh avatar
    Josh

    Every time I try to set my Info/options to audiobook, all the info I just put in there just disappears after I hit ok. It seems pretty inconsistent in iTunes. Some audiobook files I put in the audiobook section fine, but these last four books of mine I am having a terrible time with. So you guys are telling me that if I switch it from mp3 to AAC it should be good to go?

  7. Josh avatar
    Josh

    Every time I try to set my Info/options to audiobook, all the info I just put in there just disappears after I hit ok. It seems pretty inconsistent in iTunes. Some audiobook files I put in the audiobook section fine, but these last four books of mine I am having a terrible time with. So you guys are telling me that if I switch it from mp3 to AAC it should be good to go?