Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks

See also:  Taming iTunes for Classical Music

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What Difference Does It Make?

iTunes and iPod treat audiobooks differently from other audio files in these ways:

• Audiobooks are automatically bookmarked: if you stop an audiobook in the middle and play something else, then go back to the audiobook, it will start playing where you left off — even after resynchronizing your iPod.
• There’s a special Audiobooks entry in the main menu.
• You can play audiobooks faster or slower than normal speed.
• Audiobooks can have chapter stops within them.
• Audiobooks are automatically skipped during shuffle.

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? It’s easier to manage one file for an audiobook than a group of files, and free software is available to merge audiobook files.

Even 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 iPod.

Step 1. Import CDs

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 3.

1a. Set Import Preference to AAC 32 Kbps

For spoken word, 32 Kbps is perfectly adequate and will compress about 4 minutes of sound into 1 MB. And when there’s just one person speaking, you can save 50% further by selecting mono.

Select menu items Edit → Preferences → General and click Import Settings. (In older iTunes versions, Edit → Preferences → Advanced → Importing.) Then choose these settings:

• Import Using: AAC Encoder
• Setting: Custom (If it’s already selected, select it again.) This brings up a dialog for the AAC encoder.
• AAC Encoder: For spoken word, set Stereo Bit Rate to 32 Kbps. Jeff Loden, in private correspondence, recommends these settings:
  Sample rate = auto
  Channels = mono
  Use VBR, Use high efficiency, Optimize for voice = all unchecked.
• Click OK.
• Back on the Importing dialog, uncheck Create Filenames with Track Number.

For that matter, 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 rather than the custom settings listed above.

1b. Join Tracks within a Chapter

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.

Here’s the process:

• Insert the CD and wait for iTunes to display its contents.
• Identify the starting and ending track of each chapter. (If you don’t have a printed track listing, you can double-click on any track to play it.)
• Highlight all the tracks of a given chapter by clicking on the first one and then shift-clicking on the last. Select the menu items Advanced → Join Tracks.
• Repeat for each additional chapter or partial chapter.

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.

1c. Tag the Tracks

Elsewhere, I’ve talked about tagging CD tracks to work effectively with an iTunes library. This section lists the fields that matter for audiobooks.

Common Tags for all Tracks on the CD

Select all tracks (Ctrl-A in Windows, Command-A on Mac) and edit these tags:

• Artist: the author’s name, not the performer’s (my rationale)
• Album: the book title — make sure this is the same for all CDs of a book
• Grouping: (leave blank)
• Disc Number: (useful for keeping chapters in order in iTunes, though it doesn’t help on iPod)
• Composer: the name of the reader or performing group
• Genre: the supplied “Books and Spoken”, or anything you desire (I use “S/Fiction”, as explained in my list of genres.)

Name Tag for Chapter Titles

Don’t waste time with a Name tag for every track on the CD. Give just the first track of every chapter a Name tag, since the other tracks will lose their names during import anyway.

How you name the chapters depends to some extent on whether you’re planning to merge the audiobook into a single file, and which iPod you have.

• If you will merge the chapters into one file, and you have an iPod Classic (2007) or later, both iTunes and iPod will display chapter titles. When you select the audiobook on your iPod, it will give you the chapter titles as a menu, in order within the file. So it makes sense to tag each chapter with its number and name.
• If you will merge the chapters into one file, and you have an iPod 5g (60 GB) or earlier, it won’t display chapter titles. iTunes will display them, so if you play your audiobooks in iTunes you may still want to tag each chapter with number and name; otherwise “Ch 1” and so forth will probably be good enough.
• If you will keep each chapter as a separate file (not my recommendation), then you need to give some thought to the Name tag. Why? because iTunes can sort by album, but 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.

  When each chapter is a file, I recommend a two- or three-part Name tag: short form of book title, chapter number with leading zeroes if necessary, and chapter title if desired. For example, here are some chapters from my audiobook conversion of The Lord of the Rings:

  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 numerals. 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 “(begin)” or “(part 1)” to the name; if the CD starts with part of a chapter, add “(end)” or “(part 2)” to the name.

1d. Import the Chapters

Click the Import CD button. When iTunes finishes importing, eject the CD. If this is the last or only CD, go to Step 2.

Repeat steps 1b through 1d for each additional CD in the book.

Step 2. Reset Importing Preferences

At this point, you have your importing preferences set for audiobooks. To avoid a nasty surprise the next time you import a music CD, you might want to change your settings back now.

Select menu items Edit → Preferences → General and click Import Settings. (In older iTunes versions, 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."

Step 3. Merge All Chapters into a Book

Now that you have the CDs in iTunes, use some handy free software to merge the files into one and insert chapter marks. (In earlier versions of this Web page I put each chapter in its own file, just making the best of the lack of Windows software in 2006 to merge AAC files. If you still prefer to keep chapters as individual files, please see the Appendix below.)

For Windows users, I strongly recommend Chapter and Verse, a freeware program by Jeff Loden. “C&V” merges AAC or protected AAC files, which you can drag and drop directly from iTunes or from Windows Explorer. It imports metadata for the merged file and optionally for the chapter names. (iPod 5G and earlier iPods can’t show chapter names, but iTunes does and iPod Classic does. When you select an audiobook file that contains chapters, iPod Classic even displays all the chapter titles as a menu and lets you jump right to a particular chapter.) C&V can even add the final book to your iTunes library.

The author clearly put a lot of thought into the user interface, and I have also found him to be highly responsive to questions and problem reports. (The problems I reported were not problems in Chapter and Verse, but errors in files created in an earlier version of iTunes. The latest version of C&V corrects those iTunes errors in imported files.)

David Schlachter offers a suggestion for Mac users: Join Together by Doug Adams. According to the Web site, “Join Together automates the process of joining the files of selected iTunes tracks [into] single AAC Music or Audiobook file/track. Optionally, you can then create a ‘chapterized’ audio file of the exported AAC file with pointers to the ... tracks.”

Ellen Morton reports “sweet” success with a program called Audiobook Builder for her Mac with Snow Leopard.

If you can’t use the above programs, you might find some help in this iLounge Forums thread: Adding Chapters to Audiobook Files at ilounge.com.

Appendix: If You Don’t Merge the Audiobook Files

Possibly you prefer not to merge your audiobook chapter and partial-chapter files into one. In that case, recent versions of iTunes will let you change individual “songs” to audiobooks, as follows:

1. Right-click on the song listed in iTunes and select Get Info.
2. On the Options tab, change Media Kind to Audiobook.
3. Click OK. iTunes will move this item from the Music section of your Library to the Audiobooks section, but the name and location of the actual file won’t change.

I’m indebted to correspondent Eric Hansen for pointing out this new capability of iTunes.

What’s new?

• 22 Aug 2011: Update recommendations on the Name tag for chapters to account for the iPod Classic; also mention the chapter menu in iPod Classic.
• 2 Jan 2011: Add Audiobook Builder, recommended by a reader.
• (intervening changes suppressed)
• 10 Mar 2006: new document