Importing Audiobooks to iTunes on Windows

I may have found a new passion: Audiobooks. While for quite some time I was rather skeptical, even when my girlfriend gave me "The Hobbit" as a Christmas present a year ago I hardly tried it. I just could not imagine sitting around and listening to someone reading a story to me.

However back then I did not have an iPod (or any other portable music player for that matter), so now - listening to podcasts most of the time I drive, walk or do my household chores - I reconsidered when I got hold of a "Glenkill" set of CDs.

My first shot was to just import them into iTunes. However that way all 5 CDs with all their tracks showed up in my "Music" library section where I really did not like them. Even though you can change the files' properties to exclude them from shuffling this was not really acceptable for me.

A colleague told me that he had found "Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes" when he was trying to do the same thing for his children's audiobooks and they served him well. However there is one slight detail that makes them (at least for now) unsuitable for me. Let's just say there is a part of the site's name that does not lend itself to a Windows or Linux user...

There are some suggestions, but most of them involve re-importing the CDs as a single file per CD into iTunes - something I did not really want to do if not absolutely unavoidable, because I consider swapping media a rather boring task.

So I went and looked for something similar to the above mentioned Apple scripts for those being stuck with the Windows based version of iTunes. Eventually I found just the right tool for the job: Mp4Box or rather its GUI front-end YAMB.

Once I had downloaded and installed it I could join all the single m4a files I already had into a single large one. The GUI is a little rough around the edges (try and re-order the tracks to see what I mean), but that's alright. After some time (the progress indicator is not really helping) I ended up with a new MP4 file that contained the concatenated tracks I had fed into YAMB.

Importing it into iTunes once the file suffix had been changed to "m4b" (the file extension for audiobooks) automatically put it into the "Audiobooks" category. I have not found out yet, if I can define chapters or bookmarks - that (and syncing it to the iPod) will have to wait until tomorrow.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Audio books are here to stay . I am in love with them . Not only its interesting to hear voices , you can enjoy them while moving. I hear audio books all the time in my car . One of my friend is so crazy about audio books . He takes long routes to get back to his home . You can find some cheaper audio book library online .
Sun Mar 23, 07:31:00 AM GMT+1
Ahmed Ali said…
i have seen your site.i like all material which you have added in it.i want your help to increase my business and in the promotion of my site named newinapple.com

http://newinapple.com/

[Ipad-Iphone-Ipod-MacBook]
Sat Oct 23, 12:01:00 PM GMT+2
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SAXParseException: -1:-1: Premature End Of File - Misleading error

Today I had to look at a piece of code a colleague had written, using my XPathAccessor class. She used it in a servlet which gets XML formatted requests. As those are generated by an external 3rd party tool we agreed on some XML schema definitions. Everything they send us needs to conform to its corresponding schema, each reply we send gets validated against a different set. In order to allow independent testing on either side, we provided a little test kit that allows testing our system without having to set up a servlet engine. Basically it just takes a file, reads it into a String and hands that to the handler. First it gets parsed without validation. This is necessary to find out which type of request we were send (the address is the same for all of them). After the root element is known, it will be read again, this time using the right schema to verify the request. Once that is done, some reply is put together and sent back to the client. So far, so good. When I looked at
Read more

Amiga 500 Restoration: A501 Memory Expansion

Image
The previous posts were mostly about cosmetics. This one is more technical, dealing with the repair and some preventative maintenance of the A501 memory expansion card. If you are curious to learn more about the retrobrighting of the computer’s case, don’t worry — I’ll get back to that at a later time. This is the third post in a series about restoring an Amiga 500 back to its former glory. Here are all of them so far. I’ll try to remember to update this in all related entry. 2017-12-24:  Amiga 500 Restoration 2018-01-05: Retrobrighting I 2018-02-05: A501 Memory Expansion 2018-02-05: Mouse and Mainboard Maintenance Amiga Memory — The Basics When the Amiga 500 was first introduced, it came with 512KB of memory. That was already double the amount the original Amiga 1000 had, but still not a whole lot. Especially when developers started to get familiar with the audio and video capabilities of the machine, RAM became a limiting factor in what you could do. Merely copying a single
Read more

Something to know about Toshiba external USB HDD

As I wrote before, luckily I bought an external hard disk and started backing up my data just in time. Well, although this may look like talking bad about good things, I still believe I should post this. The drive model I bought is a Toshiba PX1269E-G50, a 500GB external USB 2.0 model. On the box it says this: Optimized for digital video, photos and music storage. Fanless design for near-silent operation. Interface: high-speed USB 2.0. Interface transfer rate (max.): 480 Mbps. Rotational speed: 7200 rpm. Cache: 16 MB. PushButton Backup. Password security. System requirements: PC with minimum 233 MHz pentium or equivalent (Celeron, AMD, etc.), Windows 2000/XP, available USB 2.0 port. I read this before buying in the store. I did not care for whatever "PushButton Backup" is. I still don't. I did not care for Password security. I still don't. It says Windows 2000/XP, but after all it is a USB mass storage device. Not needing the nifty Windows backup or security tools
Read more