How can I play audiobooks and music from the same playlist, in the same app, on my iPhone?

Thank you Kilgore-Trout. Yeah, I've assumed they're functioning as designed, but I wish they weren't designed that way. An "audiobook" of a brief language-dialogue file that I want to play on repeat doesn't seem that unusual a use case, yet it's one the iPhone doesn't currently (conveniently) allow. Plus the four-digit track bug is a problem for me. I can totally understand why Apple has hived off podcasts and audiobooks into different apps on the iPhone, but I wish those different apps had the same playlist functionality that Music still (mostly) has.

The app Smarter Player seems to help a little bit - I can have Media Kind = Audiobook and Media Kind = Music in the same playlist, and play through the same app. But it hasn't been updated in almost three years.

Thanks Rysz. Yes, I can change the Media Kind, and that's what I used to do - that's actually how I got into the mess of some of the tracks being Music, and others being Audiobooks, even though on my iMac they're in the same playlists. But these are language lessons with track numbers going up to 3,000 or so, and now if I change those files at all (or for that matter, even "Get Info" and then use an arrow to go forward or back a track, without changing anything!), the track number resets to 1 or 2 (some kind of bug in iTunes: see link in original post). So changing the media kind will completely destroy the sorting in the playlists. I can use one of Doug's Apple Scripts to add the 4-digit track number back in, and that works OK for a handful of tracks, but for the thousands of tracks I'd have to renumber, no way.

Rysz wrote:

Well, perhaps it's time to keep audiobooks in iBooks and music in iTunes?

Ah, but is a 30-second practice dialogue that I want to repeat five or six times music, or an audiobook? The categories are a bit artificial, which is one reason I miss the days when I could have them all in the same app, or at least have equal playlist functionality (especially repeat, and jump forward/back 30 seconds) in all audio apps.

I'd like to just rename all these language lessons as Media Kind = Music, but because of the "I see this track number has four digits, and you can't do that, so I'll just reset it!" bug (?) in iTunes, that's well-nigh impossible for me. The 4-digit track numbers are how they're organized. Until that bug gets fixed (and yes, I've sent feedback), I'm stuck with the straddling of Media Kind that I've currently got. If I change the Media Kind, I lose the track number, and thereby the sorting.

I'm trying to remember how I got into this mess ... at one point they were all podcasts, but I changed them to audiobooks because iTunes kept deleting massive amounts of podcasts, then I renamed them as Music because audiobooks moved to iBooks with a total lack of playlist functionality or track titles (at least the latter problem has been fixed), then once I discovered Audiobook Browser I renamed most but not all of those files as audiobooks again, and then that 4-digit-track bug came in, so now I'm stuck with half and half.

Searching on the iPhone should theoretically make things easier, but it seems like Spotlight on the iPhone doesn't search iBooks, unfortunately.

Anyway, I guess for now I'll stick with my usual system. Preview the dialogue file repeatedly in the Music app. Switch to the Audiobook Browser app to listen to the lesson discussing the dialogue. Then go back to the Music app to review the dialogue.