iOS 5 Music.app on iPad doesn't support audiobook chapters

Apparently we're about the only users that listen to audiobooks on the iPad. I was just sure there would be rather a large outcry at the loss of key functionality. Even if the user base is small why is it helpful for engineering to delete the functionality?

I routinely record and assemble lectures and seminars for various groups and deliver them as *.m4b audiobooks with chapter marks, titles and so on. The users that I distribute these audiobooks to have a variety of devices: iPods, iPhones and iPads and so on. Now the ones with iPads won't be able to listen to the audiobooks effectively.

The Audible player and the Bookmark app player are not solutions because the interface provided from the iPod/Music shared library area does not provide access to chapter information.

Audible I suppose has no incentive to support non-DRM'd audiobooks and Bookmark uses whatever interface is provided by Apple to the shared area.

Essentially, the only app that can be used to access chapterized non-DRM'd audiobooks is the Music.app which is no longer functional on the iPad.

Contacting Audible is an intersting idea, and contacting Apple at Apple - iPad - Feedback (and on radar if you're a developer) would also be a good idea as the more people that report the issue the more likely it is that someone will take notice. I fear that apparently not many people listen to audiobooks on iPad so even though there was no obvious reason - and certainly no benefit - to remove the ability to view chapters and select them, there's not enough outcry to get anyone to care about restoring the feature since there's not enough pain.

As a software developer - sometimes at large corporations as well as small startups - I find these occasional seemingly capricious changes to the functionality of software in the iPod / iOS line a strange phenomenon. From the outside looking in, one only sees apparently random reductions in functionality. It's not about changing the way some functionality is made available. It's about deleting a needed functionality altogether. It's like someone arbitrarily deciding to remove the ability to cut and allowing only copy and paste and otherwise using the delete key.

Three years ago a similar situation arose with audiobook support on the then new iPod Classic and some of those decisions linger on in the current ambivalent support for audiobooks in the iOS line of products (see e.g., 1500 audiobooks lumped itno one menu: Apple Support Communities and iPod Classic and Audiobooks (Audible,...: Apple Support Communities).

It would seem that perhaps audiobooks are seen as a fringe form of media that is supported to the degree that it is able to be treated as music tracks but otherwise not much care seems to be paid to the audiobook format. this seems perhaps like what happened with the chapter support in the rework of the Music app for iPad. Rather than work in the chapter support with the pop-over panel that presents the parts (tracks) of the audiobook it was decided to just leave it out and present the audiobook as a set of tracks using the same code that was implemented to view music albums.

Great!! Thanks for the links. I used them all except CNET was too finiky for me to get through - I'm not geek enough I guess.

May be we can get a bit of a momentum to get this issue addressed in iOS 5.0.1.

That's odd. Have you tried quitting the Music app and maybe restarting the iPad and possible deleting and reloading the audiobooks from your iTunes library. Those are all things I would try if I was having the problem. Is it happening on all audiobooks that you have? This seems some what a different issue (and certainly a more frustrating one) than the problem of not being able to view and select chapters.

I've always been puzzeled about the podcast management as well. It does seem like all that is available is to manually go to the iTunes app and check if there are new podcasts in a given series. There are at least some decent podcast apps available. But there are no third-party audiobook apps that support chapter access other than Audible's app that only works with their own DRM'd audiobooks.

In another thread: IOS5: audio book stops after each section JSchibo notes that the new Music app on the iPad stops at the end of each audiobook section / part / segment. So there are at least three gratuitous deletions of functionality from the iPad version of the Music app:

1) no support for chapter viewing and selection

2) no 30 second repeat button

3) audiobook playback is not continuous but arbitrarily stops at the end of each section

It sure seems like whoever coded this puppy doesn't listen to audiobooks with it.

EthanJM: I've never used mp3 files as audiobooks with chapters. The only format I've used is basically aac tagged as *.m4b. There's a nice tool that you can use to join a collection of mp3 files into a single audiobook with chapters: Audiobook Builder. It's not free but it works very nicely to generate aac format audiobooks that play very well with iOS 4 and iOS 5 on iPhone / iPod Touch. There also were some free tools from Doug Adams that worked with Apple's unsupported ChapterTool utility that allowed one to put together aac flles with chapter marks. One would use iTunes to convert the mp3s to aac and use the scripts and so forth to make the audiobooks. The Audiobook Builder tool does all this stuff in a single app.

It may be that what you were doing was working more or less by accident on iOS 4.