How do I arrange multiple audio books?

I usually use playlists to seperate the books. For the order, I've usually been able to (in itunes) use the track number (or disk number) to arrange them in order.

I agree completely. I'm guessing the audiobook community hasn't been big enough or loud enough to get apple to really listen.

dave

No, the "audiobook community" already knows that real audiobooks are mpeg 4 files that iTunes/iPod recognizes by its .m4b extension (one file, optional chapter index included) and the only thing missing is for iTunes to create them directly, right now you have to create an album which is .m4a and rename the file.

So there's no need for playlists, no mixing happens, no play order problem, the .m4b files go into the Audiobook library section...

Maybe I misunderstood your post. Yes, you have to manually (or use a script, which I do)convert the file to the b type to end up in the audiobook sections. It's my experience, however, that all the files end up in that one list/menu (totally seperate from music, but all book chapters/files in teh same directory). If you have 8-9 books on your Ipod, each with 10-30 chapters that are their own file, then you have easily over 100 entries that are in the audiobooks section. If there's a way (other than playlists) to have a sub folder that is a single book, that would be great. Otherwise, I end up having to scroll through a bunch of other books to get to the one I happen to be listening to (unless I was lucky and it was the first in the list).

Am I missing some cool feature that helps with this?

Thanks

dave37 wrote:
Maybe I misunderstood your post. Yes, you have to manually (or use a script, which I do)convert the file to the b type to end up in the audiobook sections.

Not exactly, there are manual procedures, scripts, and applications that do the conversion.

Others and myself have answered this point and recommended several options on this forum. There are at least 2 commercial apps, one (very good) for Mac and one for Windows, and at least one free app for Windows.

I have experience with several, one (command line, no GUI) that I haven't seen mentioned in this forum is NeroDigitalAudio which has an encoder and a tagger which can add chapters but iTunes doesn't recognize them.

It's my experience, however, that all the files end up in that one list/menu (totally seperate from music, but all book chapters/files in teh same directory).[snip]

Then you are doing it the wrong way. The .m4b file, as I said before, is a mpeg 4 file, which is a 'container': it can have any number of files, I believe one of which is the chapter index.

Am I missing some cool feature that helps with this?

Yep, definitely. The tool I use most is http://www.freeipodsoftware.com/ which is free and missing some features: no addition of cover art (have to do that inside iTunes), no chapters, long books (over 15 hr) sometimes show a bogus length in iTunes (but work otherwise fine). Actually iTunes has problems with a lot of long files produced by other applications, for instance the time for a book encoded with neroAacEnc.exe always is shown as twice the length on iTunes, and the iPod jumps at the end (no problem with the audio, the time just jumps from say 7 hr when the book ends, to the 14 hrs it was showing as its lenght).

If you search this forum or others about audiobooks you'll find a lot of material. I would recommend to start with the best application there is (and I haven't used it or own it, it's for Mac only, but it shows the way things should be: http://www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder/ ).

rbo7,

Thanks for taking the time. It sounds like you have discoverd something I haven't (and I've ripped 150+ books, so new features mean a lot to me). When I get a book from the library, I rip a single file per cd. They come into itunes as .m4a, and I have a simple script that turns them to .m4b so they show up as audio books. As far as I know, .m4b is just a different file format that now contains my cd and shows up as part of an audiobook that I have ripped. And 10 of these files make a book. You mention that an m4b is a container. Can I group mutiple m4b files together (10-16 per book) to make a single m4b file? I have read the forum, but haven't seen how to do this. This is why I usually end up with 10-20 files per 10 hour book. I'd love to know how to do this differently.

Thanks,
Dave

"Then you are doing it the wrong way. The .m4b file, as I said before, is a mpeg 4 file, which is a 'container': it can have any number of files, I believe one of which is the chapter index."

dave37 wrote:
When I get a book from the library, I rip a single file per cd. They come into itunes as .m4a, and I have a simple script that turns them to .m4b so they show up as audio books. As far as I know, .m4b is just a different file format that now contains my cd and shows up as part of an audiobook that I have ripped. And 10 of these files make a book. You mention that an m4b is a container. Can I group mutiple m4b files together (10-16 per book) to make a single m4b file?

No, the m4a/m4b contains the sound .aac files, plus tags, and maybe other files. I see that music is one track per file, audiobooks have multiple tracks, I usually do CD to mp3 (one track per chapter), then add all the mp3 to one audiobook file with the program I mentioned (which has the option to also create multiple files, which I don't like, but it's there to avoid the ugly bogus total time bug).

Perhaps a clearer example is video on iTunes/iPod, those are .m4v files (also mpeg 4) which have a video stream, one or more sound streams (one for each language), tags, and optional subtitles files and chapter index.

I have read the forum, but haven't seen how to do this. This is why I usually end up with 10-20 files per 10 hour book. I'd love to know how to do this differently.

The easy way: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7177537#7177537

The last application listed uses iTunes to do the hard work, so there is a way (which I have not used) to rip each CD to create sound tracks (not containers), then add all of them to the audiobook (Join CD tracks perhaps). Could be that it first encodes to mp3 then joins using aac encoder. By the way, that application also has (or will have, last time I saw it was on a companion app) the chapter tagging capability.