One of the reasons I distrust the new version of iTunes (see Why I hate iTunes 7) is the utter uselessness of its new Library structure. In particular, its new Audiobooks category seems to be locked off from any books you’ve ripped yourself. Setting the Genre type of each file to “Audiobooks” isn’t enough.
Nudged by a comment from Rob, I did some digging around, and it appears that audio files will show up in the Audiobooks section if they’re bookmarkable MPEG Layer 4 files — or, in iTunes parlance, “Protected AAC files”.
On a Windows PC, it may be possible to get your AAC files — which should end in the extension .m4a — simply by renaming them so that the extension is .m4b (I can’t vouch for this, though, as I’m working on a Mac).
Macs are slightly trickier to deal with, anyway, as files have an internally-held file type, which must also be altered. However, I did find a couple of scripts on Doug’s Scripts which help.
- Make Bookmarkable converts your AAC-encoded files to their bookmarkable version, then updates their iTunes entry so that they move to the Audiobooks section.
- Join Together allows you to combine multiple files from the iTunes Library, optionally placing chapter marks and track artwork at the appropriate sections. However, this script requires QuickTime Pro and Apple’s ChapterTool command-line utility. It can also be very slow if you don’t check the “Passthrough” option in the QuickTime settings part of the dialog.
A bonus of both scripts is that your recordings will also show up under the iPod’s own Audiobooks category. Bear in mind though that, unlike the standard Music folders, it doesn’t group tracks by album. So if you decide to use Make Bookmarkable, or don’t have Quicktime Pro, you could end up with lots of individual files showing up. In that case, you could consider re-importing the original audio from CD, grouping data tracks to encode as a single file.
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