audiobook organize

There is a simple and somewhat manageable workaround for this but as you said, "inelegance" is definitely the right word to describe this nonsense:

Append the name of the book to the Album Artist tag. This then will create a folder for each book in the iTunes Media/Audiobooks folder.

The Album Artist tag does not show up in Audiobook mode if it is blank though so the Media Type has to be changed to Music first (File>Get Info>Options>Media Type>Music>Ok). Going then to Music mode, select your book, Get Info, add the new Album Artist tag then switch the Media Type option back to Audiobook.

Example:

Artist: J.R.R. Tolkien

Album: The Hobbit

Album Artist: J.R.R. Tolkien - Hobbit

And so on.

In the Finder this will then be the result:

/iTunes Media/Audiobooks/J.R.R. Tolkien - Hobbit/[Hobbit files]

/iTunes Media/Audiobooks/J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings 1: Fellowship/[LOTR1 files]

/iTunes Media/Audiobooks/J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings 2: Two Towers/[LOTR2 files]

/iTunes Media/Audiobooks/J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings 3: Return King/[LOTR3 files]

/iTunes Media/Audiobooks/J.R.R. Tolkien - Silmarillion/[Silmarillion files]

And of course the author name can be Last-First in the Album Artist tag if you want the folders to show in proper Library order.

Depending on preference, in List View for Audiobooks, show column browser and control-click on the Authors heading then select “Use Album Artists”.

So it’s a workaround, it works decently, it’s relatively easy, and frankly I hate it. YMMV

iTunes 12.7.2 has introduced an interesting arrangement for the audiobooks grid view. See Set audiobook sort names for best results for details and a possible workaround.

tt2

The flat folder structure under audiobooks is clearly ridiculous - it boggles my mind that the person who came up with this could have possibly missed that occasionally authors write multiple books.

The best I've been able to do is hack it by setting the author field to "<author name> - <book title>". This at least forces iTunes to separate books into different folders.

I believe iTunes organizes its items in the media folder by author/artist first, then album name. Are your tracks fully labeled in iTunes?

See Audiobooks on iPods. If you let iTunes organize them then yes, it will put them in a flat folder structure which is, I suppose, reasonable for single file books by the same author, but not quite so elegant when you have multiple multi-track books in the same folder.

tt2

You're welcome. 🙂

OS X can be a little more forgiving than Windows if you manually reorganize files within the same volume, however you might be storing up trouble for when you need to move the library in future. The other approach is to turn off the iTunes Keep Organized feature and manually organize everything the way you want it before you add it to iTunes, but that requires more effort for little real reward.

I consider the author more significant than the narrator when it comes to organizing audiobooks, likewise the composer for classical music generally replaces the artist & album artist in my library with the performers getting a spot in the comments. If only iTunes would give us access to a few more fields and allow some of them to be collections as intended.

tt2