If you’re like me, you have a handful of old tapes and/or CDs that aren’t music, but are ‘audiobooks’ for lack of a better term. I happen to have a 1.5 G collection of Jack Benny MP3s. By in large, I only listen to these at home, piping it through to my stereo. Sometimes, though, when I’m in transit and I lack the ability to bring a book with me, I want to listen to my ‘tapes’ on my iPod. Since they’re in MP3 format, I thought this would be no problem.
Wrong!
They show up fine as a normal playlist, but as an MP3 I can’t use the ‘cool’ bookmarking tool and save my place when I turn off my iPod or plug it back into the dock or, forbid, switch to listen to music. This is a minor problem. The other one is that they don’t show up in the Audiobook section, so I can’t slow down the reading. Fine. I need a fix.
The fix, thankfully, is simple. Presuming you’re starting with MP3s and not a CD, follow these steps and you’ll be cool.
(1) Select all your Audio Book MP3s and make the Genre “Audiobooks.”
(2) Import your MP3s into iTunes and convert to M4A (aka AAC).
(3) Rename .m4a to .m4b
(4) Make them bookmarkable
(5) Delete the MP3s from iTunes and reimport the M4Bs
A lot of places also suggest that you join your MP3 tracks, which is easy to do when they’re on a CD, but a lot of mine are split up over quite a lot of CDs (Harry Potter takes up two!). Someone suggested usign Filesticher to combine them and then Xmp3split to split them back up but … My actual books are split into chapters already, and I can’t see what I gain with a split and separate.
(1) Select all your Audio Book MP3s and make the Genre “Audiobooks.”
This is pretty easy so you can figure it out on your own.
(2) Import your MP3s into iTunes and convert to M4A (aka AAC).
Normally when I do this, I let iTunes pick the best (and subsequently largest) format for Apple’s ‘lossless’ encoder. For music, that’s fine and geenrally what I want. Bigger file means better music and so on, which is great for music (where scratchy sounds make you wince, unless it’s that live jazz recording of Ella in Berlin…) but not needed for audio where a little low fidelity won’t kill you.
Go to the iTunes Perferences menu and click on Importing. Change Import Using to AAC. Change Setting to Custom. When prompted from the Stereo Bit Rate stuff, select 64 kbps. Yes. I know that audiophiles will lament that music is ripped at 128 minimum. This isn’t music. It’s books. Carry on.
(3) Rename .m4a to .m4b
You can do this the long way (click, wait, rename, click…) or the way I did and used FileBuddy. My best friend.
(4) Make the .m4b’s bookmarkable
I used an applescript for this, called Make Bookmarkable. You can get it at Doug Scripts (search for ‘bookmarkable’). Windows users are on your own.
(5) Delete the MP3s from iTunes and reimport the M4Bs
I’m not giving you directions here. Hi. Carry on.