Split Audiobook files

So I have downloaded a few audiobooks and I noticed that the books are not broken down very well. For some of them each file is like 8 hours long and not really broken down into chapters or with any discernible logic. This naturally is not very ideal to me if I am listening in short sessions in my car and want to navigate to specific chapters of a book.


Any idea on if it is possible to break up the clips into smaller segments?


Thanks

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Mar 24, 2016 9:02 AM

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9 replies

Mar 24, 2016 9:30 AM in response to destind4film

Usually it is the other way around and people are complaining about audiobooks being too broken up and wanting to know how to import them joined. If you have files that are 8 hours long then these are not standard audio CDs because those have a maximum of 80 minutes duration. It would help to know more about these CDs. If the files really are 8 hours long you will have to use an audio editor to split them up. iTunes has very primitive (actually not really by design) editing capabilities and the best way to do this will depend upon the format files you have.

Mar 24, 2016 10:28 AM in response to destind4film

Oh, I really am not familiar with those. Are they DRM protected? If they are there's nothing much you can really do about it. If they are not then an audio editor should work. Ideally use one that can do it without quality loss or re-coding which means something which can handle AAC/mp4-audio natively. I know something like MPEGStreamclip can do that kind of thing though it may be cumbersome and I don't know if it works under El Capitan anymore.

Mar 24, 2016 12:41 PM in response to destind4film

I am not very familiar with audiobooks and Apple and don't know if while Apple does not sell DRM music any more it may still sell DRM other formats (I know all movies are DRM). m4p does stand for protected but those are music files. I thought m4b meant audiobook format.


Very specific steps had to be taken to get non-DRM versions of old DRM files.

Mar 24, 2016 1:27 PM in response to Limnos

Yes, I know that the movies and TV shows have DRM. Is there a way to upgrade to a non-DRM version of these audio files? It seems like a pretty bad move on their part to have audiobooks with such huge chapters like this. Even the DRM audiobooks that I get through other Apps are broken up nicely so you can easily just jump to specific chapters. I know that you can set the files to remember your spot but if I have the audio book on my computer and listen up to a certain point and then want to resume listening in my car later on my iPod this strategy doesn't work out at all.

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Split Audiobook files

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