Obscure iPod Audiobook Issue

// August 19th, 2004 // Techie

I realize not many people are using their iPod for reading audiobooks, but the touted features of bookmarking and “speed reading” with audiobooks on the iPod definitely sounded worth at least trying them out.

I hopped on over to the local library and grabbed a few books-on-CD, then iTuned them over. Well, the newly downloaded books did not show up under the audiobooks category. To cure this (at least on Windows), I had to rename all of the audiobook files from the “.m4a” extension to “.m4b”, delete the old files from the iPod, then upload the newly renamed files. Sucks that it takes doing that to get it to work, but it does work nonetheless. Now I can bookmark my place in any of the audiobook files, then go listen to music and come back to the place where I left off in the book. C’mon, that’s friggin’ cool.

The speedy reader is really nice, too. It doesn’t increase the pitch of the narrator at all, just speeds it up somehow without being overly fast. Someone’s probably timed the differences in Normal vs. Fast. (UPDATE: It seems it’s 25% faster, so for the math deficient that means you can read an hour’s worth of book in 45 minutes.)

UPDATE: Found more information on this here, but I didn’t notice an issue with needing to use a space at the end or caps.

UPDATE 2: Another thing I wanted to be sure to mention here. I’ve noticed several times already that if you have a rather large audibook file (larger than 1 CD worth, that is), you may run into problems with the bookmark feature when leaving the book and playing music. At least with two audiobooks so far, which I had combined into one huge file totaling maybe 10-16 hours, I would pause the book to listen to music. When I came back to the audiobook, my bookmark was there and I was able to continue playing from that point, but about ten seconds or so into the book, it would stop and dump me to the main iPod menu. When I went back to the audiobook, my bookmark was gone and I had to start over. Once I did start over and fast-forward to my old spot (which I luckily caught a glimpse of before starting), it would continue fine. This only happened when I left the book to listen to music; if I simply paused or turned the iPod off while listening to the audiobook, I could go back without a problem. Again, this only seems to occur with very large files.

UPDATE 3: Here’s a handy shell command I use on my .m4a files to convert many to .m4b files:

ls *m4a | cut -d . -f1 | awk '{print "mv ""$0".m4a" ./""$0".m4b""}' | bash

Works like a champ.

39 Responses to “Obscure iPod Audiobook Issue”

  1. Rodney says:
    October 11, 2005 at 5:31 PM

    I’m sorry, I still can’t figure out how to change the file type. I remember doing it before, long ago, but I can’t seem to have any effect on the files now…

    Here’s what I did. I located the file from “my computer”, pressed f2, then went to the far right and typed in .m4b. Then I updated my Itunes, then moved all the songs onto my IPod. For somereason, it still isn’t working properly.

    I’m using Windows XP, if that helps at all.

  2. Marek says:
    October 16, 2005 at 6:06 PM

    What program can I use to merge a number of audio files to create one large file?

  3. Mako Kid says:
    January 24, 2006 at 3:58 PM

    Thanks so much for this post… I have not yet tried this and I hope it is the best way to move my ripped CD books from Songs to Audiobooks. I am assuming that it will also remove them from the Shuffle feature. I’ve only had my iPod a week, but this is very promising. I have a good 50/50 split between books and music and I was bummed that I couldn’t get my books into the Audiobooks section of my iPod.

    Thanks Again,

    p.s. – Any ideas on how we can clean up the CDDB that is used by iTunes? Some of that stuff is really screwed up. — Dare to dream…

  4. Carolyn Pitchford says:
    April 12, 2006 at 7:26 PM

    This article is very easy to understand:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1846814,00.asp

  5. George says:
    July 27, 2006 at 1:11 PM

    To rename lots of files use the rename command. On my box it comes from the util-linux rpm.
    rename .m4a .m4b *.m4a

  6. Aaron says:
    December 3, 2006 at 2:41 PM

    You’re a little math deficient yourself. If it’s 25% faster, than you could read an hour’s worth of material in 48 minutes. You can’t just subtract 25% from the original time. If you read it 100% faster, you would be reading it twice as fast – but according to your math, it would take you zero minutes to read anything at that speed.

  7. Rob says:
    December 26, 2006 at 1:40 AM

    I can load my audiobook files onto my ipod nano by clicking and dragging them into “music” in itunes. they are correctly read and played as audiobooks. i cannot, however, access them afterwards from itunes nor delete them. any advice?

  8. John says:
    January 16, 2007 at 2:32 AM

    To merge different mp3 files into a big one I use a little free program called mp3 merger. http://mp3merge.netfirms.com/

    I was looking for a solution to the problem the author explained above. With big files, after about 5 mins into the audiobook the ipod pops you back to the main menu, then you loose your bookmark. Any ideas on how to solve this?

  9. Adam says:
    January 16, 2007 at 11:47 PM

    Lookup (for Mac users) Audiobook Builder on http://www.versiontracker.com – it does all this dirty work of importing and making nice, neat .m4b files to your liking. It is shareware and costs a few bucks but it is worth it in my opinion. 

  10. JD says:
    February 24, 2007 at 12:53 PM

    My audiobook files show up in the audiobook folder AND the music folder. How can I get them out of the Music folder and only into the audiobook folder?

    thanks

  11. Florian says:
    May 20, 2007 at 6:31 AM

    Hi!
    On http://www.freeipodsoftware.com you can download a free MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter for Windows. You can also combine multible MP3s to a single *.m4b File with it.

  12. John says:
    March 9, 2008 at 9:57 AM

    I have found a website which shows you a much easier way to convert your audiobooks using a free program

    http://www.freewebs.com/ipod-audiobook

  13. iandelor says:
    March 14, 2008 at 4:54 PM

    For all you people complaining that you don’t want your audiobook files to shuffle, why don’t you just select that option in the info page for the file? You can select every audio file you have at once and change them to not play during shuffle all at once! Voila! Problem solved.

    Apple should be told this is waaaaaaay too much work to get audiobooks into the audiobook folder, though. A tiny update to the iPod software would fix this.

  14. John says:
    May 22, 2008 at 6:36 AM

    There is a better way to convert audiobooks using a free program. This free program allows you to convert these files to audiobook files and when you impoert them into iTunes they will come up in the audiobook library.

    Check out http://www.iPod-Audiobook.co.nr

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