Importing Audio Books to Itunes

I assume it's a MP3 audio book? If so, you are correct, you need to import it to Music. Once it's there, right-click and choose Get Info. On the Options tab there's an option to set the Media Kind. Change it to AudioBook and click the checkbox to remember Bookmarks (or playback position) (so it remembers where you left off). Click OK and you're done. It will appear on your iPod in the Music Player - More - AudioBooks.

A quick Google search took me here: http://aldoblog.com/2008/09/itunes-8-is-great-for-audiobook-lovers/

Although it's a little old, it still works!

Good Luck!!!

See also http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/audiobooks.asp

tt2

That'll work great & all, until you try to put them on an iPod. For some reason iPods organize Audiobooks just straight by the titles of the files so if you have 3 mp3 audiobooks on at the same time you'll have"01 Harry Potter 1 Part 001" followed by "01 Harry Potter 2 Part 001" followed by "01 Twilight Part 001", 02 Harry Potter 1 Part 002", "02 Harry Potter 2 Part 002", "02 Twilight Part 002", etc, etc.

There are some free programs that'll let you make your own .M4B Audiobook files.
If you still want to do the MP3s then I'd recomend ripping with the Bitrate set to ≈32kbps & in Mono. You'll get much smaller files & won't loose anything since it's Spoken.
If you want to go the M4B route, try Xrecode or Chapter & Verse. I'd recomend Xrecode if you're tech-savy, but Chapter & Verse works good & is very easy to use.
For either one you'll want to start by ripping at a higher quality, For Xrecode I use FLAC (Your default MP3 settings should be fine) so that when it's converted there's less loss. I know it sounds wrong since I just told you something else, but you'll delete them after the encode anyways.
Make sure to choose the option to 'Optimize for Voice'. I'd recomend making them into 1 MP3 for each chapter, or at least finding & tagging the ones where a new chapter starts, that way they'll have chapter marks in the file. (So you can easily skip from chapter to chapter).

If you've already made the M4Bs & want to edit the chapters here's a little trick. Use MetaX it's actually a tool for Tagging Videos, but since the M4Bs use the same MP4 container for the chapter info, It'll let you edit it without re-encoding to save (Like if you edit in Chapter & Verse).

LostOnline wrote:

That'll work great & all, until you try to put them on an iPod. For some reason iPods organize Audiobooks just straight by the titles of the files so if you have 3 mp3 audiobooks on at the same time you'll have"01 Harry Potter 1 Part 001" followed by "01 Harry Potter 2 Part 001" followed by "01 Twilight Part 001", 02 Harry Potter 1 Part 002", "02 Harry Potter 2 Part 002", "02 Twilight Part 002", etc, etc.

While you probably get a better final experience if you're prepared to invest the time in converting to a fully chapterised audiobook I've written a script to overcome the sorting issues which is detailed here and takes very little effort to apply.

tt2

It's actually not that time consuming with Chapter & Verse. It'll only take time if you want it to be nice with chapter- chapters. If you don't mind having each file as a new "Chapter" it only takes a few minutes.