revised 5 Dec 2007
Copyright © 2006–2007 by Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems
You can download audiobooks for iPod from the iTunes Music Store and other sources, but what about audiobooks you already have on CD? If you simply import the CDs, iTunes will treat the tracks as “songs” and you won’t get the audiobook features. I’ve seen plenty of instructions to convert MP3 files to audiobooks, but little about converting CDs.
This page tells you how to create audiobooks from your CDs, using just iTunes 6 or higher. In brief, you import your CDs as big AAC files, then rename the .m4a files to .m4b, then clean up references in the iTunes library. Then you’ll have full bookmarking, immunity from shuffle, and the ability to play faster or slower.
Contents:
See also: Taming iTunes for Classical Music
Copying: You’re welcome to print copies of this page for your own use, and to link from your own Web pages to this page. But please don’t make any electronic copies and publish them on your Web page or elsewhere.
Acknowledgment: The basic idea of renaming .m4a files to .m4b is due to “robert” in this thread at iLounge. That Guide is good as far as it goes, but it’s crusted over with information for old versions of iTunes, a couple of procedures aren’t clear, and it misses a couple of shortcuts. I did some investigating and a lot of experimenting on my own, and I offer this page as a modern step-by-step guide.
iTunes and iPod treat audiobooks differently from other audio files in these ways:
When you download an audiobook from the Apple music store or other sources, it’s automatically set with these features. But what if you have an audiobook on CD? Without special software, you can get almost all the features of a “real” audiobook: bookmarking, immunity from shuffle, the special menu entry — everything, in fact, except the chapter stops.
Why not just use the iTunes settings Get Info → Options → Remember playback position and Skip when shuffling? Two reasons: you can’t multiple select and access those settings, and even if you set them laboriously one “song” at a time, they still don’t appear in the Audiobooks menu in iTunes or iPos.
The approach in this Web page is to put each chapter in its own file. You might prefer to have one book per file, with chapter stops within the book; if so, see Adding Chapters to Audiobook Files at ilounge.com.
What if you already have MP3 files? You’ll notice that this section is titled Import CDs. If you’ve got the CDs, you’ll get best quality by importing them fresh. The reason is that MP3 and MP4 use different compression schemes. Converting from one to another will not give as good results as importing directly from CD.
But that’s not the whole story. While it’s true mathematically, you may or may not be able to hear a difference in sound after converting MP3 to MP4, particularly at 32 KBps. If you have MP3 files, you can experiment with importing them into your iTunes library as 32 KBps AAC files and see if they sound acceptable. If so, proceed with Step 2.
For spoken word, 32 Kbps is perfectly adequate and will compress about 4 minutes of sound into 1 MB.
But there’s nothing to stop you from giving the “audiobook treatment” to regular music files, for instance if you want bookmarking and don’t care about shuffle. For music, you probably want to stick with iTunes’ default of 128 Kbps.
Select menu items Edit → Preferences → Advanced → Importing. Then choose these settings:
Down the road, we’re going to rename the .m4a files to .m4b. These show up in the library in the Kind column as “AAC audio file” and “Protected AAC audio file”, respectively. Therefore we want the Kind column to be visible. Here’s how to accomplish that:
Audiobook CDs are usually divided into tracks that are much shorter than the chapters. You want to join all tracks for each chapter into a single “song”, unless you really want the ability to play smaller units by themselves. The tradeoff is that the smaller you make your recorded divisions, the more scrolling you’ll have to do on iPod to play a particular passage.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for joining all tracks of a whole book into one file. I’ve chosen not to, because I like to know at least roughly where in the book I am. If you want to do it, you’ll need to join all tracks of each CD, following the process in the Appendix to join the tracks of multiple CDs.
Here’s the process:
If there are any partial chapters — a continued chapter at the start of the CD or an unfinished chapter at the end of the CD — join all the tracks of the partial chapter in the same way. You’ll decide what to do about partial chapters in step 1e below.
Elsewhere, I’ve talked about tagging CD tracks to work effectively with an iTunes library. This section lists the fields that matter for audiobooks.
A note on sorting: Though iTunes can sort by album, iPod will sort audiobook tracks by name. (Presumably the designers expected every audiobook to be a single large file so that there was no need for an album-level menu like the one you get with music.) Therefore you need to set Name tags that group the books with chapters in the correct order on iPod.
If you don’t want to tag tracks as I suggest, you can make each audiobook a separate playlist. This lets you control the grouping and the order of play; but it’s extra work, it clutters up your Playlists menu, and it loses the advantage of the Audiobooks menu on iPod.
Give just the first track of every chapter a Name tag, since the other tracks will lose their names during import anyway.
LotR 0-1. Foreword
LotR 0-2. Prologue
LotR 0-3. A Note on the Shire Records
LotR I-01. A Long-Expected Party
...
LotR I-12. Flight to the Ford
LotR II-01. Many Meetings
...
LotR II-10. The Breaking of the Fellowship
The chapters of “LotR” are numbered within books, which are designated by Roman numberals. Fortunately, the alphabet matches numerical order for I through VIII. I had to assign a fake “book” number of 0 to the front matter to keep it before Book I.
If the CD ends with part of a chapter add “(start)” or “(begin)” to the name; if the CD starts with part of a chapter, tag the first track on the CD and add “(end)” or “(finish)” to the name.
Now select all tracks (Ctrl-A in Windows, Command-A on Mac) and edit these tags:
At this point you have a decision to make. The biggest question in this whole process — really the only question — is what to do when a chapter is split across two CDs.
The easy thing is just to name them with “(begin)” and “(end)” and accept that that chapter will be split into two files. But if you’re a perfectionist like me, you want to have one file per chapter even if it takes extra work. And it does take extra work: my Appendix for Perfectionists: Join Chapters across CDs is about as long as the rest of this page.
If you can accept splitting a chapter into two files when it was split over two CDs:
If you want one file per chapter always, even for chapters that were split across CDs:
Repeat steps 1c through 1e for each additional CD in the book.
Now that you’ve imported all the files for one book, browse in iTunes library to the album title for that book. Click the album title to select the whole book and only the book. Right-click any track, and select Show in Windows Explorer in iTunes 7, or Show Song File in iTunes 6. This brings up a window containing the files for this book.
All the file names should end in .m4a; if so, go on to step 2b.
If the file names end in a different extension, you didn’t set the import preferences correctly in step 1a. Close the file window, delete the files from iTunes library, and re-import them as AAC files.
If you don’t see any file extensions, neither .m4a nor dot-anything-else, you’ve got Windows set to hide them. You can fix this by a setting in the newly opened window (the file list, not the iTunes library):
This is the key, and there are at least two ways to do it.
If you’re comfortable with the command line (still called “DOS” by many people), open a command prompt, navigate to the directory that contains the files, confirm with a dir command that you have the right location, then type this command:
ren *.m4a *.m4b
This will rename all the files in one operation, and you can go on to step 3.
If you’d rather not fuss with the command line, you can still rename the files through the GUI, but you’ll have to do them one at a time. Here’s how:
Repeat for each file in the folder.
I have no experience with Macs, but correspondent Michael Temkin tells me that on a Mac “the type of the file, not just the extension, needs to be changed. For .m4a files it will be ‘M4A ’ (note the trailing space, 4 characters) and it needs to be changed to ‘M4B ’.”
Now you have your chapters as .m4b files, “protected AAC”. You need to tell iTunes to recognize them, and then clean up the stubs of the old file names.
In iTunes, select File → Add Folder to Library. Navigate to the album folder and click OK.
You’ll see a “Processing” progress box for a longer or shorter time, depending on how many files you have in the folder.
In iTunes 7, the Library is no longer one big list. Instead, there are separate indented items for Music and Audiobooks, among others. Click the Audiobooks collection and verify that your .m4b files have been added.
While iTunes now knows about the newly renamed .m4b “protected AAC” audiobook files, it still lists the old .m4a regular AAC files. Your next step is to remove those obsolete pointers, as follows:
Correspondent Sara Lawrence reports that with iTunes 7.2 she could not delete the obsolete stubs. I’ve had no problem like that in 7.2, but if you do then you may want to use a script by Teridon that worked for her.
Select Edit → Preferences → Advanced → Importing.
For Import Using, select AAC Encoder.
In Setting, select Custom, even if it’s already selected. An AAC Encoder dialog box will open up; click Use Default Settings and then OK.
You might wonder whether the default of 128 Kbps is adequate for encoding music. After extensive tests, MusicAustralia, a national archiving site, says here that "the QuickTime MPEG-4 AAC codec provided very positive results at a bitrate of 128 Kbps."
When you imported the joined tracks in step 1e, iTunes appended “Track 02 – Track 03” or similar to the chapter titles. Now you want to clean up those titles.
Method 1: Single-click the first title, right-click and select Get Info or press Ctrl-I (Command-I on Mac). Edit the Name tag, then click Next or press Alt-N and edit the next tag, till you’ve done all of them.
Method 2: Single-click the first title, wait a moment and single-click again (or press the F2 key). You should see an in-place edit window open. Press the End key, then Backspace to remove the extra characters, then Enter. Repeat for each title. (I prefer Method 1 because it can be difficult to time the multiple single clicks correctly for Method 2.)
This should be routine: simply connect iPod and let iTunes download the new files.
But if you previously downloaded regular AAC files, new protected AAC files with the same names may not get downloaded. To check this, go into Audiobooks on iPod and verify that the expected tracks are all there. If they’re not, you can force a download with one of these methods.
Method 1: Select all the tracks in a given audiobook, right-click and select Get Info, and make some change in the Album tag. Right-click on iPod in the Source list and select Update Songs. Then, if desired, change the Album tag back and update iPod again.
Method 2: In iTunes, select Edit → Preferences → iPod and set iPod to update manually. Wait for the update, then click iPod in the Source list, find the audiobook in the iPod list, and delete all of its files — make sure you’re deleting files from iPod and not from iTunes library at this point! Then set the preferences back to automatic and update songs again.
You’re reading this Appendix because you want one iPod file per chapter, even when chapters are split across CDs. It’s certainly doable, but it takes a bit of extra effort and you need to go outside iTunes for part of the procedure.
To accomplish this, you’re going to import as WAV rather than AAC, join the chapter fragments outside iTunes, and then convert complete chapters to AAC.
This appendix tells you how to join one chapter at a time. However, you could do step B and step D repeatedly, then proceed with step E and following to add all the merged chapters at once.
An alternative to my method is the YAMB front end to MP4BOX, described here. It obviously works for some people, but after playing with it for a couple of hours I gave up on getting it to work for me.
iTunes can convert to and from WAV format, but it can’t join files into a single track — Join Tracks works only on tracks on a CD, not on sound files. You need separate software to join or “merge” WAV files. Chances are good you’ve already got a suitable program kicking around on your computer, but if you need one I recommend the freeware WavMerge for Windows users. If you don’t already have a suitable program, please download WavMerge before poceeding.
Why WAV format and not MP3? Programs to merge MP3 files are plentiful, but the problem is that MP3 is a “lossy” format, and so is AAC. You don’t want to import into one lossy format and then convert to another one: that’s two steps in degradation of quality. WAV is a lossless format: if you import from CD to WAV format and then convert to AAC, the sound will be mathematically the same as if you had imported directly from CD to AAC.
Why not just store everything permanently as WAV files? WAV files are huge: about 10 MB a minute. A megabyte will store only six seconds in a WAV fle, but a full minute in an AAC music file at 128 Kbps and four minutes in an AAC spoken-word file at 32 Kbps — that’s 40 times the capacity.
You’ve already imported any complete chapters. Now you need to import the fragments that span multiple CDs. To import fractional chapters as WAV files, you need to set up iTunes.
Select Edit → Preferences → Advanced → Importing. In the Import Using drop-down, select WAV Encoder, then click OK.
You’ve already joined tracks for
all complete chapters and chapter fragments, but you
imported only the complete chapters. Now
you’re ready to import the chapter fragments as
WAV files.
In iTunes’ CD window, carefully uncheck all the complete chapters and check the chapter fragments. (To uncheck all checked tracks, press and hold the Ctrl key and click on any checked track.)
You see an example at the right: this particular CD starts with two complete chapters and ends with a fragment of a chapter. (Some CDs might begin with a fragment as well.)
The chapter fragments won’t be stored permanently, so there’s no need to tag them carefully now: you’ll apply final tags after merging the WAV files. For now, you could use simple names like “Chap04a”, “Chap04b”, and so on. But in the illustration I chose to use full names even for fragments of chapters.
Browse in iTunes library to the album title for your audiobook. Click the album title to select the whole book and only the book. Right-click any track, and select Show Song File. This brings up a window containing the files for this book, which will be helkpful with the next step.
Open your favorite program for appending or “merging” WAV
files, and tell it to merge the two (or more) files for the current
chapter.
In many programs, including WavMerge as shown at right, you can simply drag files from the open Show Song File window to the open merging program. But be careful! They may not show up in the order you expect. To prevent this, I always drag the files one at a time.
Use your program to write an output file, and store it in same folder as the original WAV files. This will make them easier to keep track of. The name of the output file doesn’t matter, because iTunes wil change it anyway, but pick something you can recognize.
You can now close your WavMerge or other program. If you get a message asking whether you want to save changes, say no — you’ve already saved the file that matters, and you don’t need to save any sort of layout or project file.
Now the chapter is there as a single file, but iTunes doesn’t know about it yet. The next step takes care of that.
In iTunes, select File → Add Folder to Library. Navigate down to the folder for this album, which contains your newly merged AV file, and click OK. You’ll see iTunes “processing” all the existing files, but don’t worry about that because it’s not actually doing anything to them.
Now your newly merged WAV file is part of iTunes library, but even though it’s physically in the album folder iTunes doesn’t list it in the library under that album.
To cure this, open your “Recently Added” playlist, which iTunes maintains automatically. Your newly merged WAV file will show at the top of the list. Right-click it and select Get Info, then fill in the Album tag and correct the title (the Name tag). As soon as you click OK, iTunes adds the merged chapter to the album for this audiobook in iTunes library.
Next, click on the Library source and go back to the album for this audiobook. You’ll see that the newly merged chapter is out of order.
To cure this, right-click it and select Get Info again, then tag the Disc Number and Track Number. I normally assign them to the disc and track number of the first track of the chapter on CD.
While you’re tagging, also fill in anything else that’s tagged on the other chapter files but not the new one.
Set iTunes back to AAC import format; see step 1a for instructions.
Then right-click on the merged chapter and select Convert Selection to AAC.
If you’ve just added more than one chapter, you can click one, Ctrl-left-click on each of the others, and then right-click on any on of them and select Convert Selection to AAC. But don’t waste time converting the chapter fragments.
Caution: iTunes may truncate your file name when it does the conversion. After conversion, check the file name and “song” title.
The WAV files have served their purpose, and you can delete them now. In iTunes, click the Kind column head, scroll to the bottom, select all the WAV files, and delete them.
Remember, WAV files are massive. You probably want to right-click your Recycle Bin and empty it at this point, to make room on your hard drive.
Finally, click the Album column head, and continue with step 1f or step 2.
(intervening changes suppressed)
this page: http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/itunsabk.htm
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