IPod Classic and AudioBooks

Hello Sunnymary,

Yes you can.

Here is a great site that provides a bit more detail about audiobooks in iTunes and how to sync them to your iPod.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/the-complete-guide-to-ipod-au diobooks

Hope this helps. 😉

B-rock

With iTunes 8 and above you have the option to tell iTunes to treat any audio file as an audiobook. Simply select the tracks, *Get Info.*, then on the options tab set *Media kind* to Audiobook. You can also set options to *Remember playback position* and *Skip when shuffling*.

Assuming, however, that the books consist of more than one file you may have problems if you plan to listen to them on an iPod. The Audiobooks feature was originally designed for books that have been stitched up into a single file and hasn't been updated to reflect the changes that now make multi-track audiobooks easy to work with in iTunes. The main issue is that the iPod lists all audiobook files by track title/chapter name so unless you rename every track using a scheme such as *Book Title, Chapter XX* the tracks will play out of sequence. There are tools for creating iPod-friendly audiobooks for which Aldo on Audiobooks is probably the best reference. Personally I don't bother with the extra effort and just have an "Audiobooks" playlist folder containing sub-folders for each author and within these playlists for each audiobook. Although I still mark the files as Audiobooks to keep them out of my main music section when it comes to the iPod I ignore it's Audiobooks feature and use my own playlists for access.



Note that I've used leading digits in the playlist names to arrange these in chronological rather than alphabetical order.

tt2

N.b. If you're having trouble organising audiobooks within iTunes see my previous post on Grouping Tracks Into Albums, in particular the topic One cover for multi-disc album.

Question. I downloaded an audiobook from Itunes. When playing part 2, the track play fine until about 48 minutes left, then all of a sudden skips to part 3. I can play all of part 2 fine thru the computer, but not on the Ipod. Any suggestions?

My standard post on skipping tracks is below, but to be honest I don't recall having a problem with any of my Store downloads or ACC files. I don't know of an equivalent of MP3Val for AAC files. You might be best to go back to Apple, describe the problem and request a fresh download to see if that cures the issue. In iTunes click on Store > View my account > Purchase history > Report a problem and take it from there...

tt2

*Skipping songs*
The iPod seems to fail to play all of the occasional track that iTunes, and indeed other PMPs, are happy to play. There is probably some minor technical error in the internal structure of the file which is normally ignored by other playback software but causes the Classic to bail out.

For MP3's you may like to try scanning the files with MP3 Validator which can find & fix some internal MP3 errors.

Some users have also suggested that completely removing all id3 tags and then replacing the information can be a solution. This can be achieved in iTunes by selecting an affected track, right/option clicking and using the option Convert id3 tags > None. Since some files may mistakenly have more than one tag you may need to repeat this action. Once you have confirmed that no tag is present you can replace the tag information using Convert id3 tags > V2.3 (I believe it is recommended to avoid using V2.4).

Personally I've have found files for which these solutions don't work. In this case the workaround is either to re-rip the tracks or get iTunes to re-encode the file, e.g. convert AAC to MP3 or vice versa and sync the newly encoded file to the iPod instead. Because transcoding will cause a loss of fidelity you should keep your original file so that if a future iPod firmware resolves this issue you can put your original file back onto the iPod.

HI Sunnymary

You can also purchase audio books from Audible, which is where I purchase mine.

Their software is set up to work with iTunes and it is a pretty painless experience.