iPod Audiobooks on Multiple CDs

[betbest1]

I have Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on CD (23 and 17 CDs, respectively), and I want to add them to my iTunes library. (Actually, I already have OoP, as 24 kbps mono MP3, but I would be willing to re-rip it.) I would like the audiobooks as a single bookmarkable AAC audiobook. I was considering Join CD Tracks, but that wouldn't work across CDs, and 23 files is still too many. Does anyone have any ideas? I use Windows, so no ChapterTool, and I don't have QuickTime Pro. I'll still keep the MP3s for transferring to my non-iPod MP3 player, but I want a single bookmarkable, chapter-separated AAC to play in iTunes (like the audiobooks from Audible or iTMS).

 

[barneygumble]

I have Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on CD (23 and 17 CDs, respectively), and I want to add them to my iTunes library. (Actually, I already have OoP, as 24 kbps mono MP3, but I would be willing to re-rip it.) I would like the audiobooks as a single bookmarkable AAC audiobook. I was considering Join CD Tracks, but that wouldn't work across CDs, and 23 files is still too many. Does anyone have any ideas? I use Windows, so no ChapterTool, and I don't have QuickTime Pro. I'll still keep the MP3s for transferring to my non-iPod MP3 player, but I want a single bookmarkable, chapter-separated AAC to play in iTunes (like the audiobooks from Audible or iTMS).

Put them in a single playlist? only thing i can think of

 

[balamw]

How I did it (copied from a post I did on Slashdot):

My two cents on this since I just converted the 17 disc Harry Potter to bookmarkable AAC. I used iTunes 4.9 to rip the CDs using the new Podcast "optimize for voice" preset. NOTE: Bigger files are supposed to be more skip prone http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93318 and eat more battery life due to the way the hd & cache are handled so I kept my files to single chapters which were about 40 minutes each, encoded at 64kbps.

I used "Join Tracks" to gather each chapter into an individual file), but a few chapters were spread over 2 consecutive discs and I wanted to combine them, so I used mp4box http://gpac.sourceforge.net/ (Windows, Linux, but not OS X) to losslessly concatenate the AAC files. I then manually used a hex editor to change the file type from "M4A " to "M4B " and changed the file extension from .m4a to .m4b and changed the genre from "Books & Spoken" to "Audiobook". (AFAIK the rename trick only works on Windows, while the hex editing also works on OS X) Created a Smart Playslist for the whole set of files and enjoyed.

A few more possibly useful links MarkAble http://www.ipodsoft.com/index.php?/software/markable (Windows only) is supposed to help automate the process I went through, but I'm not sure how it concatenates the files and wanted to learn, and the aforementioned Doug's Applescripts http://dougscripts.com has Join Together (OS X only), but that requires QTPro and it is still not clear whether this is a lossless concatenation or not.

iTunes 6.0 removes the need for MarkAble, since that is exposed in the GUI now. You could use mp4box to join all the files together, but that seems not to be advisable. Keep the files less than the cache size for your iPod.

EDIT: Barney's tip is the other part of this. Create a smart playlist that has playcount < 1 so that every time you sync the files you have already listened to are removed from the playlist.

B