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

I've found a way to read my audiobooks with iOS 5 on my iPhone : you create a playlist on iTune like with any music playlist and drag your audiobook in the playliste. It worked for me with audiobook and it supports audiobook chapters... i don't know if it works on iPad.

J'ai trouvé un moyen de contourner le problème et de lire mes audobooks sur l'IOS 5 de l'iPhone. J'ai crée une liste de lecture sur iTunes et j'y ai mis tous mes audiobooks. Je peux à présent les lire sans problème, avec les chapitres...

The inability to use audiobook file chapters on iPads using iOS 5 is a major application degradation for the education community and the large federal agency that has developed this feature as a training tool. Please fix this ASAP!

OMG Apple! Fix this, please. I have a crying 7-year-old because you have effectively ruined the iPad for audiobooks.

Hey guys!

Since the update to 5.0 was a complete lack of functionality, I hoped to see an improvement on 5.0.1 and really wished that you have heard our call. So I remained silent because nobody is perfect and criticism could be a point of origin for improvement. Now, I just upgraded to 5.0.1 and was wasted to see that you DIDN'T EVEN TRY TO SOLVE that problem! Really... audiobooks and podcasts on iPad are great and I love listening to them while browising websites or playing games on it. Sometimes, my attention lacks and want to jump back a chapter or just a bunch of seconds and was always happy having had the opportunity to do so. Why don't you want to integrate that functionality anymore?

Using a brand new iphone 4s with new installation of everything, I have exactly the same problem with mp3s defined as audiobooks. Touch them to play, the now playing screen slides into view and flicks back again, as if the file is empty or broken. The files play perfectly when categorised as music. Barely believable that they could screw this up. And it does matter - if I had realised I wouldn't be able to play audiobooks properly I wouldn't have bought it. It's bad enough having to handle everything through itunes in the first place, and lack of proper audiobook implementation (which was working absolutely fine in ios4 on my ipod touch 3rd gen) would have turned me towards Android for sure.

EDIT: One way of making them work seems to be to add them to the itunes library on the computer first, change them to audiobooks, and then drag them onto the iphone. A hassle, as I don't use itunes for anything other than dragging files directly from my computer onto a device, as I can't stand the way it organises music.

Side note, not sure if there is another thread for this issue, but the handling of compilation albums is also a nightmare - I now have 230 or so albums of "The top 250 hip hop songs" or whatever, each with a different artist. I've tried changing the settings etc but no difference, but maybe that is because I'm changing the settings directly on the iphone in itunes? If that is the case, it means I need to drag all the files back into itunes, delete them all from the iphone, change them, and drag them back, in order to achieve a simple edit. That is top class unusable ********.

I have posted the following on the iPad feedback site and plan on posting it everywhere i can - Compilations on iPad is not feasible - not when i plug in and listen for hours while traveling!

any recommendations or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!! reply to shartrax@yahoo.com - THANKS

"What did you guys do to my iPad music app?? AND WHY??!! - even though it WAS working beautifully and you changed it for some reason - i'd still have no complaint except that I have to go all the way backwards and use my iPod nano (THE ORIGINAL one) - in order to listen to my audiobooks. My tracks are all out of sequence now. and no matter what i do, how i change the name of over 1,000 tracks - it still plays the tracks out of order. My iPad is virtually unusable for an important reason i have my iPad! i want to listen to my books on my new iPad - and now i can't . thanks. ALOT!"

I found a couple of alternative apps that go a long way to allievate the broken audiobooks and podcast functionality.

I purchased Downcast, which seems to be pretty nice so far. It has a few nice functionalities, including being a complete management package for podcasts. No more having to synch with iTune for podcasts.

I couldn't find an audiobook player for the ipad, but I did find some for the iphone. I hate having to use iphone apps on my ipad, but at least it more than restores functionality.

I found the alternatives in a link someone posted in this forum. http://appadvice.com/applists/show/best-universal-audio-book-apps.

I tried a few of the free ones. I like Audible so far, since I already have an account with them. It also lets me access the audiobooks I have synched to itunes, so it's all good. One nice options of audible, is that it allows you to create bookmarks.

I also tried Audiobooks. Like Audible, it lets you access your iTune content. It also lets you skip backward and forward in 10 secs, 1 min and 10 minutes increments. It allows you listen to podcasts as well.

These are the free apps I tried. But they seem to do the job as well or better than ipod, and I might never go back to using the music app.

Thanks Angelyne! - I've had an Audible account for years, but haven't checked it in quite awhile, so didn't know that it could access iTunes or uploaded content - Yay. it works reasonably well.

I'm taking a look at Downcast and Audiobooks as well

Thanks so much for pointing me in the right direction!!

Since the latest upgrade( 5.0.1 ), I have the same problem as EthanJM. The play icon for the entire music app seems to be frozen permanently in pause - it looks as if it's going to play but then immediately returns to pause.

I have tried deinstalling everything, ie all books and music then reinstalling but without any change.....it still won't play!

After the disappointment of the loss of audiobook functionality and now this, I have been forced back to my old iPod.

It seems to me that it plays a single chapter at a time in the default view, but tapping the musical note and going into the alternate view results in chapters playing consecutively.

It seems this discussion is still alive and since I see some others are having the same problem I was I thought I should post. I got the MP3 audiobooks to work now. First I removed them completely from my device and iTunes. Then I put them in iTunes but did not sync. In Get Info properties I filled out this information for each chapter(file)

Name- chapter name

Artist- author

Album- book title

Make sure the author and book title are the same for all files in a book. Also set media type to Audiobook. That is under a different tab. If you want it to continue where you left off set Remember position to yes.

This should compile all files as one book under the books tab in your library. Make sure that you have your Books set to sync as well. Connect the iPad and sync. Those property settings must be set properly in iTunes before syncing or it will not work.

Now it seems better than a regular audiobook because at least you can see the different chapters like a playlist. The only problem is once one chapter is over I can't figure out how to make it play the next, it just stops and you have to select the next one. Also the missing features 30sec back etc. is a bummer.

One last thing, if you want you can also set the genre to the chapter files as audiobook, then it can be played under the genres tab on your device as well. This does not make it show in your songs list, only under genre: audiobooks.