GarthDB

How to Make an iTunes/iPod Audiobook [tutorial]

Sep 20, 2008 Tutorials

This tutorial will be useful for you IF:

• You have audiobooks on CD, or in mp3 format

AND

• You are too cheap to purchase the audiobook from the iTunes Store

OR

• Your book is not available on the store

AND

• You have some time, and enjoy organizing (you just want your stupid book to show up in the stupid audiobook section and you want chapters even if you might never use the feature)

OPTIONAL

• You need a mac if you want to put chapters in the file. Sorry.

In this tutorial I will step you through joining the tracks into a single file (depending on the size of the book) with chapter markers and a bookmark. Then you will throw the file into the audiobook section on your iTunes/iPod/iPhone where it should be. There are a few apple scripts you will need. One costs $10, but has a 30 day trial so this tutorial should be free.

For this tutorial you will need:

• An audiobook consisting of multiple mp3/AAC tracks in iTunes
• iTunes 8 (you can do it in older versions, but the screen shots I’m using won’t match 100%)
• iTunesJoin – $10 but free for 30 days in my opinion worth the $10 if you have a bunch of cd books
• Make Bookmarkable – free iTunes Script
• Apple Chapter Tool – somehow the site is down and I can’t find this tool anywhere.  I have emailed Apple with an inquiry, but who knows what will happen there.  Email me and I will see if I can help you get it. chaptertool [at] garthdb.otherinbox.com.  Until then, no chapters… sorry.

Ok first lets install the scripts.  iTunesJoin is pretty easy, just download and run the installer.

Make Bookmarkable is pretty simple too.  After downloading, unzip it and run the installer. Mine went automatically into the installer.
If you find get your hands on the Chapter Tool put it your user music folder

If you are a perfectionist like me, here comes the tedious part.
I like my audio books to be without the annoying “please insert next disc”.  So I go through and edit the tracks. If you don’t care/have the time just skip this.
You can do minor cuts of tracks in iTunes by changing the start or stop time and converting the file.

1. Find a track that has a begining or end portion you wish to clip (usually the first and/or last track of the disc). Then find the point you want to start or stop the track.
2. Go to the Preferences (iTunes > Preferences [command + ,]) and change your import rate/format settings to Spoken Podcast AAC encoder.  Since you are just dealing with speech, anything above 64 bit stereo is somewhat of a waste. Make sure to change this back before importing music cds.
3. Go back to you song and right click on it and go to “Get Info”
   
4. On the track info dialogue box go to the options tag and change the Start and/or Stop time.  (In the file I am working on only the last few seconds are undesirable).
5. Hit OK and test out the track.  If you are clipping off the end of one track and the beginning of the next, you probably want to listen the the transition between the two tracks and make sure it is natural.
6. Right click on the track and choose “Create AAC Version”
   
7. Delete the original (longer) track
   
8. Repeat on all other disc transition tracks

Now that you have the tracks perfect (unless you skipped over that part), Go through and name your the first track from each chapter.  WAIT! – make sure that you have the tracks ordered first using the Track Number.  If you imported from CD this should have been done by default, but if you don’t you may loose the order of the tracks when you rename some of them.

If your book doesn’t have chapters you can skip over this part.

Now that you have the first track of each chapter named start joining the chapters.

1. Select all the tracks in the chapter
   
2. Click the Scripts Menu > iTunesJoin (if it doesn’t show up, something went wrong with the install.  Try restarting iTunes)
   
3. The iTunesJoin Preferences dialogue box will appear.  Choose the option Join losslessly if possible, otherwise Convert (your import settings should still be at Podcast quality – see above).  Don’t check “Notify if Convert was needed”.  Don’t check “Add Chapters”.  Check “Remember playback position” and the sub-option.
   
4. Click Join Tracks and pay attention to its initial instructions.  It is going to take a second to analyze which tracks you have selected, so don’t touch iTunes until it says “You may use iTunes normally.”
5. Once you have the OK to use iTunes normally again, you can keep adding new chapters to the joinning queue.  The status boxes for each joinning will overlap each other.  I like to spread them out so I can look at the overall progress.  This conversion and joinning might take awhile to complete.  Go take a break for a second.
   

Now organize the joint tracks to get them ready for the final join with chapters.

The joined chapter names consist of all the track names delimited with a slash.  Now go through and rename the joined tracks.

• Change the track name to what you want to have show in the chapter list.
• I add ” joined” to the end of the chapter name so it is easy to distinguish the joined book from the raw files
• Change the track number to reflect the chapter number and the total number of chapter tracks.  The book I’m working on (The Age of Turbulence) has an introduction that I labeled as chapter 0, but iTunes won’t let me number it track 0, so everything gets bumped one (0 -> 1, 1->2 … etc).
• Be aware that not all the tracks will show up together.  My Chapter 11 showed up way below for some reason.

Once all the tracks are renamed select them all and bring up the iTuneJoin Preferences dialogue box again.

This time make sure Add Chapters to AAC files is selected and click the Locate ChapterTool to point to the Apple ChapterTool command line program.  If you don’t have this see the requirements above.

Ok before you join the chapters you need to know that Chapter Tool has its limits.  You can not make an audiobook too big or too long.  That is one of the reasons you converted the files to Podcast quality.  If your book is too big (around 500+ MB  from my experience) go ahead and join the book into two tracks or more if needed.  My longest book is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand I think it was 40 discs and I converted it to 6 tracks.

Go ahead and join the tracks.  This will take a while again, even after it converts the file it will take a bit longer to add the chapters.  Ok I lied, it will take a long time to add the chapters.  Sorry.

When it finally finishes you should be left with one or more gigantic tracks with long names.  Go ahead and rename them to the name of the book.  If you had to split it up into multiple tracks go ahead and set the track numbers as well.

Then select the book tracks, go to the scripts menu > Make Bookmarkable.  This will convert the files to iTunes Audiobook files.

You should now find your completed audiobook in the Audiobooks section of iTunes.  You can add some artwork if you’d like (this can take a couple of seconds to process).

Play the track and you should be able to find the chapters menu appears and you can see all the chapters in the book.

Also in the latest generation of iPods and with the latest firmware for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, you can access the chapters on the go, AND best of all, it syncs your last position in the book.  So if you want to you can listen on your iPod/iPhone or iTunes and pick up right where you left off.  Just make sure you sync before switching.

You’re all set.  Post a comment if you had any problems.

Tags: Audiobook, CD, Chapter Tool, iTunes, mp3, Tutorials