Audiobooks and bookmarks?

Thanks for the reassurace razdoctor.

Which Ipod do you have?

Result of one experiment:

I turned off my nano last night in the middle a song. When I turned it on this morning, it came up at the same place.

Don't have any audiobooks on it yet to experiment on.

I don't think that's the bookmark function at work. The Nano simply resumes from the place where it was turned off. With a "bookmark" properly set for any given track(s)however, you it will resume from where it left off in that track no matter what has happened in the iterim such as turining off or playing other tracks. As I mentioned before, setting the "Remember playback position" option for a track(s) appears to work for MP3s or other non-"Audible" tracks - this option also appears to be set automatically for Audible tracks (as well as the "Skip when shuffling" option). IOWs by setting both those options for a MP3 book, it should act just like an Audible book as far as bookmarks and skipping shuffling go.

Now, whether or not such MP3s sync with iTunes bookmarks, I have not yet tried - maybe this is where the apparent problems some are experiencing occur.

Result of another experiment:

I tried listening to an audiobook that I ripped from a CD. Just like music, when I paused the audiobook, listened to a song, then went back to the audiobook, it started again at the beginning.

Result of final experiment:

I found an Audible.com audiobook I had purchased from the Music Store, copied it onto my nano and found the following:

- The audiobook chapters are visible on the nano on the 'play bar.'
- The back and forward buttons on the click wheel allow skipping between chapters.
- After pausing the audiobook playback, listening to a song, then returning to the audiobook, the audiobook playback is in the place I left it. Not at the beginning of the audiobook.

The above leads me to believe that there is automatic bookmarking going on when the nano recognizes the Audible.com format.

"The above leads me to believe that there is automatic bookmarking going on when the nano recognizes the Audible.com format."

That's what it does. Look at "GetInfo/Options for an Audible file - the "Remember playback position" & "Skip when shuffling" are checked (and cannot be unchecked). If you want the same for a MP3 book (or music), simply check off the two manually for that file.

Result of another final experiment (prompted by Laurie's post):

- The file I used was NOT one from Audible, just a regular MP3 file
- I selected 'Get Info', clicked on 'Options', then checked the 'Remember playback position' box and closed the Info window
- I copied the file to my nano, played it, paused it, and played another song
- When I returned to the first file, it was still at the paused position where I left it

So, that is the way to set up automatic bookmarks for any audio file, regardless of its type

Frighteningly enough, one of the reasons I just ordered a nano was bookmarking, and I seem to know more about it than some people on this thread just by reading up on it on the internet...

POSSIBLY MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT BOOKMARKING:
There are two ways of marking your place that are useful for audiobooks/radio programmes. One is mid-track resume. This means if you let the player time-out, it will go to sleep paused and wake up where it was. This usually works properly on almost all mp3 players with a built-in battery--players that use user-replaceable AA and AAA batteries won't do it consistently.

The other is bookmarking, which is saving your place in the file explicitly when you leave the file (freeing you to have several audiobooks and/or radio programmes without worrying about it). Modern Rio mp3 players with this feature will offer set bookmarks by number and save them in the machine's memory as Bookmark.001 and so on. Having bookmarks as files is quite useful, because if your battery dies or the machine gets confused you will still have the bookmark, but it's annoying to look at bookmarks by number and not know what the heck the file is.

Creative flash mp3 players have mid-track resume, but not bookmarking. Of their hard drive players, some of them implement bookmarking and I think some of them don't. The Creative Zen Micro implements bookmarks rather nicely by showing you track name and position for each of your bookmarks. There are two gotcha's with this: 1) It keeps it in memory rather than the hard drive, so if the machine gets confused and re-initialises its library, it will invariably lose all bookmarks, and 2) it will only play one track at a time, so if you're on, and save your place in, Track 20 of a 200-track audiobook you ripped in WMA from CD, and you're at 2 minutes into a 3-minute track, it will play the remaining 1 minute from the bookmark list, and then stop, and the only way you can then play Track 21 is navigating to it. (You can't even concatenate WMA files to make a CD-length or chapter-length file later on, unfortunately).

There isn't a single standard for these Windows-based (non-iPod, encourages Windows Media format) mp3 players as far as bookmarking goes. You're down to the whim of the manufacturer. You bookmark explicitly by saving your place in the file by pressing buttons or choosing a menu option.

The iPod implements bookmarking in a more standard fashion, in that if you download an audiobook from iTunes or you make one from CD in the .m4a format and save it as a m4b file (b stands for bookmarking) it will resume the file from where you left off last time you played it. It doesn't do explicit bookmarking by 'saving' a bookmark, but it saves your place when you leave the file. Apparently this is more likely to work when you pause the file before going to the next file, but there are comments in internet forums from people who use a Shuffle (without a screen) for audiobooks and music, so it's quite likely to work, otherwise the forums would be full of complaints.

The iPod also has cheap third-party shareware available for it that handles bookmarking. One program (MarkAble) converts from mp3 or whatever else to m4b. The other (MarksMan) allows you to export your bookmarked place from your iPod into a small text file.

Hope this helps.