by sean » Mon Feb 05, 2007 11:11 am
Yeah, there is more to getting an ipod to recognize something as an audiobook than just messing with the genre. As far as I know, itunes and ipods only recognize something as an audiobook (therefore, remembering the playback position, skipping when shuffling, etc.) if it's encoded as an m4b file. In order to make audible-type bookmarkable audiobooks for the ipod, here's what I do (unfortunately, it involves itunes; mediamonkey, as far as I know can't do any of this).
First I stitch multiple mp3s together with a program like mediajoin (I find it easier for the listening/ bookmarking to have my audiobooks as single long files). Then you have to import the large mp3s into itunes and have itunes convert them to m4a (or acc). Once that's done, just change the file extension to m4b and you have files that ipods will recognize and treat as audiobooks. This is a pain, and involves itunes, but makes for much better book listening than any of the alternatives that I know of.
Yeah, there is more to getting an ipod to recognize something as an audiobook than just messing with the genre. As far as I know, itunes and ipods only recognize something as an audiobook (therefore, remembering the playback position, skipping when shuffling, etc.) if it's encoded as an m4b file. In order to make audible-type bookmarkable audiobooks for the ipod, here's what I do (unfortunately, it involves itunes; mediamonkey, as far as I know can't do any of this).
First I stitch multiple mp3s together with a program like mediajoin (I find it easier for the listening/ bookmarking to have my audiobooks as single long files). Then you have to import the large mp3s into itunes and have itunes convert them to m4a (or acc). Once that's done, just change the file extension to m4b and you have files that ipods will recognize and treat as audiobooks. This is a pain, and involves itunes, but makes for much better book listening than any of the alternatives that I know of.