MediaMonkey forum

Is there a way to get MM 2.5.5.996 to make content to appear under the Podcast or Audiobook menu items on an iPod? I'm not asking about playlists or autoplaylists. I want to know how to make content appear under those menu items on an iPod. I've read dozens of threads here dealing with podcasts or audiobooks in one way or another, but all reference previous versions of MM, except this recent thread which says, "audiobooks only show up in the audiobooks menu if they were downloaded from iTunes."

I refuse to use iTunes.

Are the only options (1) wait for MM 3.x, (2) use iTunes or (3) get happy with playlists/autoplaylists to manage my podcasts and audiobooks? Or am I overlooking a currently-available solution?

BTW, more I play around with MM, the more I like it.

1. This maybe Sooner than Later
2. As an alternative to 1, to cut wait shorter.
3. I think there is podcast script in forum but I'm not sure about exact topic, but also alternative to 1 and cut wait shorter.

Peke,

Please forgive the stupidity of my reply, but I gather from your answer that there must be something more to making content show up under the Podcast and Audiobook menu items on an iPod than just setting the friggin genre tag correctly? Silly me, I was just driving my self nuts changing tags and re-syncing, rinsing, repeating, ad nauseam, trying to find the exactly correct spelling and capitalzation of genre tags.

Daaaaaaannnnnnnnnnng, those Apple programmers are devious.

THANK YOU, Peke, for your help and patience. A layman's description of what's going on under the hood when iTunes tags/marks/Ids something as a podcast or audiobook to make the content show up under the podcast and audiobook menu items would be appreciated.

SoonerLater

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.

You might want to try out MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter located at http://www.freeipodsoftware.com/

I haven't tried it myself (I don't own an iPod), but happened to find it on SnapFiles.com while looking for tools to help me organize my audiobook files.

If you try it, please post here what you think of it, and whether it has features that would be useful even for those without iPods.