Need Quick iTunes Help

im pretty sure that podcasts & audiobooks are only sorted into their respective sections if they are downloaded within iTunes.

if you download an audio podcasts or an ausiobook from some site iTunes just think its a music file. there is no way in iTunes to my knowledge to give them podcasts or audiobook tags. i know iTunes allows you to give music videos, tv show and movie tags to videos but not podcasts & audiobooks.

maybe this is something that you can alert to Apple by a feature request. i know ive been waiting for this feature.

 

You can get an Applescript for this

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/ has a script called "Make Bookmarkable" that will do this. It will also make text-to-speech files appear as audiobooks if you do that. (I like to convert some long web content into audiobooks so I can listen while doing something useful about the house.)

 

Search the site for "Make Bookmarkable"

Download the version that's correct for your version of iTunes. It comes with a little lightweight installer, from memory, though if this is your first Applescript you may need to create a folder for Applescripts in the appropriate location (if you need instructions, they'll either be in the folder you download or on the site, probably both). This is all a whole lot less scary than it sounds, honest! What will happen is that a new 'Scripts' menu will appear in iTunes when it's all done. Then you'll locate the files you want to become audiobooks, select them, then choose Make Bookmarkable from your new scripts menu in iTunes. It will, if necessary, convert the files to the correct format for audiobooks. Then it will add them to your Audiobooks library. It will tell you what it's going to do before it does it, and it will tell you when it's done. Simple, and so useful.

There are many other useful scripts available for iTunes, too. I use "New Play Count" rather a lot (for when I've got a second, better quality version of a song from somewhere and I want it to have the same playcount as the one it's replacing, or for when I'm just sick of one song being so high up on my most played list and want to knock it back a bit). And "Super Remove Dead Tracks" can be dead useful.

(I am assuming, of course, that you're attempting to do this on your Mac. I don't imagine it would work on a PC.)

 

a "quick and dirty solution"

1. import your current audiobook mp3 (I assume) file into iTunes
2. convert to AAC (this will result in .m4a files, found in your iTunes folder)
3. go to your iTunes folder and find the newly created folder with m4a files; copy this folder to say your desktop
4. back in iTunes, delete ALL files for the audiobook
5. go to the m4a folder on your desktop and rename each file suffix to m4b; if you have many files to rename, try "Renamer4mac" a free utility
6. import the m4b folder into iTunes; it will now be recognized as an audiobook