A friend of mine has shared some Russian audio books with me the other day. Unfortunately when I added them to iTunes, I noticed that they are stored as regular music files and not Audibooks. Therefore, when started playing an hour-long one, and paused it to resume later, when I moved on to listen to something else, I lost my spot in the "book".
Itunes "adiobooks" have a unique feature in that they are
1) "Bookmarkable"
2) Are skipped during shuffle
3) Appear in the separate "Audiobook" section, such that they are not mixed with your other "Music".
I was curious as to how to convert the ordinary music tracks to Audio books, and here is what I found (This is for Mac users only. If interested, google up an equivalent simple solution for Windows users. It's easy too).
Overview
Convert mp3 -> AAC (m4a) -> m4b
Detailed Steps
1) Assuming the file type you want to convert is mp3 -
Go to :- iTunes -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing ->
Change "Import using" to "AAC Encoder" (I had it set to "mp3 encoder")
2) Highlight the tracks you want to convert to AAC. Right click and select
Convert selection to AAC
3) Once files are converted to AAC, use one of "Doug's Scripts" here
Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes ? Managing Files
Called
"Make bookmarable" to do exactly that. Make the file an audiobook.
(Description from the site :- This script will change the file type of the selected AAC tracks to "M4B " and file extension to ".m4b", thus making them bookmarkable. (That is, the track will resume playing wherever you left off the last time you played it.) Additionally, when used with iTunes 7 or better, deletes and re-adds each track so it will appear in the Audiobooks Library. Ratings, play count, last played date, skip count, and skipped date are preserved.)
Doug's Scripts is a collection of apple scripts to make you iTunes experience much more fun. Odds are, if you are a Mac user, you already know about this site. If not - go exploring now.
They are easy to use. There is an installer which will populate the scripts into the right folder. After that there is a really small scroll icon that will appear in the menu in itunes ... Or just take a second to read the instructions they provide on the site.
Just thought I'd share. Enjoy!!
Linear Mode
