Editing category (genre) of audiobooks and other metadata for Books in OS X Catalina and Big Sur

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Level 1

18 points

Editing category (genre) of audiobooks and other metadata for Books in OS X Catalina and Big Sur

With Catalina, Apple eliminated many features from Books (previously iBooks), including the ability to edit the category (genre) and other metadata of non-DRM audiobooks that were imported. ID3 tag editors can be used to edit most of the metadata fields such as title and author of mp3 files before importing to Books, but the Category such as Fiction, Poetry, etc. would either not change or appear blank in Books. After way too much experimentation I tracked down the problem:

There are two kinds of metadata associated with most audio files, the older Id3v1 and newer Id3v2. Id3v2 comes in three versions, v2.2, v2.3, and v2.4. In v2.2, metadata tags are internally represented by 3-character long strings, while in v2.3 and v2.4 they are represented by 4-character long string. In particular, in v2.2, the genre is represented internally by "TCO", whereas in v2.3/v2.4 it is represented by "TCON".

All current tagging software can read all versions of tags but can write only v1 and v3 / v4 tags, with the exception of OS X Music (previously iTunes). If an mp3 is imported into Music and it has no metadata, then Music will create v2.2 tags. If the file already has v2.3/v2.4 tags, it will continue to use that format.

Here is where the Books weirdness comes in. Books will read the genre tag (which becomes Category in list view) tag ONLY if the metadata is in v2.2 format and there are no v1 tags.

Here is a workflow that gets around these limitations/bugs. You need to install the command line program id3v2. It can be installed from MacPorts or HomeBrew. Suppose you have an audiobook named "foo" which consists of the files foo1.mp3, foo2.mp3, foo3.mp3 and you want to prepare it to import into Books.

Print out the existing metadata for reference.
- id3v2 -l foo*.mp3
Strip all the metadata from the files
- id3v2 -D foo*.mp3
Add the files to Music
Edit the metadata using the Get Info command
- Be sure to set "remember playback position" and "skip when shuffling"
- Music no longer lets you change the media type from Music to Audiobook, but that does not matter for this workflow.
Export the files back to the Finder
Strip out the v1 tags only
- id3v2 -s foo*.mp3
Import the files to Books.

If your audiobooks are already in Books and you cannot access the original mp3 files, you can find them in the secret place where Books stores audiobooks. Audiobooks are stored in separate folders whose names are long random strings. The names of the audiobooks are derived from the metadata in the files, not the file or folder names. The files are the ridiculous location:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books/Audiobooks

Posted on Dec 8, 2020 8:26 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Henry Kautz Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 8, 2020 8:52 AM in response to Henry Kautz

Additional advice: when editing metadata in Music:

edit multiple items by selecting them all and entering command-i.
put the book title in both Title and Album.
put the author in both Artist and Album artist.
include the year or set uniformly to empty.
put the book category in Genre.
under options set Remember Playback Position and Skip When Shuffling.
add the artwork to all the files.
set the Number of Tracks for all of the files.
For individual files in the book, set the Track Number field to the order in which the files appear in the book.

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Answer 2

Dec 8, 2020 6:57 PM in response to Henry Kautz

Wow. Thank you for the obvious effort but it will only help with new material.. Books from Audible are not MP3 but MP4. The same applies to books imported through Audiobook Builder that converts the file to bookmarkable MP4. Some books are available at a few public libraries as MP3 but they need to be converted to MP4.

I'll give this a try but it does not help me with Audible imports that are downloaded in First_Name, Last_Name sequence for both author and narrator so the books sort on First_name. No library in the world organizes itself on author first name. Some titles need to be slightly modified for a book series so they sort from newest back to oldest titles. It appears that Apple engineers have a challenging task to return previous functionality. I remain reluctant to install Big Sur after this experience with Catalina where major changes were made and we, Apple's customer base, was never told that once changed there was no easy way to back-off the Catalina upgrade where not only editing was lost but also the day the file was initially installed. If I could I would revert to 10.13 and wait for this to resolve,

Thank you very much for your research and efforts.

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Answer 3

Dec 10, 2020 6:44 AM in response to Henry Kautz

Thank you Henry for your reply and details.

I do not even understand the first line of your reply, so will have to leave it to those that have a greater understanding of such things than me.

Just hope that next time I add an Audiobook, that I it all works out.

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Answer 4

Dec 14, 2020 4:18 AM in response to longjohn123

Henry. That is an amazing amount of work and many thanks for the workaround. My major problem, however, remains audiobooks which are not in the mp3 format, but those from Audible and iTunes where the m4b format is applied. This is where I struggle with the Books app and is the reason I am so annoyed with the lack of changes from Catalania to Big Sur despite the outcry from Apple customers. Just not good enough!

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Answer 5

Henry Kautz Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 14, 2020 6:32 AM in response to Gareth Morris1

At least for the old Audible books I have, I simply have to change the file suffix from m4b to m4a and the Music can import them and edit their tags.

The m4a format is the same as m4b but is not copy protected. Apparently neither Music nor Books notice or care that the files are really copy protected.

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Editing category (genre) of audiobooks and other metadata for Books in OS X Catalina and Big Sur

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