We’ve already introduced you to the joys of podiobooks, but for those who are interested in listening to their conventional audiobooks with all the friendliness that iTunes and the iPod allow, we’d like to pass along an excellent resource. Kirk McElhearn, frequent contributor to Macworld and MacOSXHints.com (as well as a MacUser reader), has penned a fantastic step-by-step guide on how to get the most out of importing your CD audiobooks into iTunes.
Kirk runs you through the import process, including tagging (a critical and often overlooked task!) and encoding (including picking the right quality for your audiobook). While the audiobooks that you import yourself won’t end up in the Audiobooks section of iTunes, Kirk points out that that may be for the best, as there are some bugs with iTunes’s handling of those types of files. Instead, he shows you how to whip up a quick and easy Smart Playlist for your books.
I’ve played around with audiobooks now and again, but it’s never something that’s really grabbed me: I’m more of a reader than a listener. Still, I know from our podiobooks post that many of you enjoy listening to stories on your iPod (mental note: must get around to podcasting my novel…), so I highly recommend Kirk’s post to you.
Sounds good, but one of the advantages of having the files in the audiobook section on your iPod is changing the playback speed to be faster or slower. As well as setting up chapters.
Luckily Doug's Applescripts will help take care of all of that.
Actually, while the speed change can be interesting for some books, the fact that bookmarking is pretty much unreliable, at least on home-made books, is a deal-breaker. And chapters don't get added to audiobooks; chapter breaks do, but not names - that only works with podcasts. (I just talked to Doug about that today in fact).
Kirk