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AudioBookBuilder

Well some little while ago I was having a conversation with my friend Mike Potter from the formaceyesonly podcast about the awful way iTunes imports Audiobooks that I own on CD, or rather doesn’t import in a way that is useable.

After both agreeing that iTunes doesn’t do a very good job, he pointed me to a product that I have used a lot since AudioBookBuilder. Since my girls have a number of audiobooks all on CD, they still want to listen to them but on their iPods.

If you’ve never tried importing an audio book into iTunes, you haven’t experienced the way it seems to randomly name the files or if it doesn’t randomly name them, it doesn’t seem to put them in the correct order, and even if it puts them in order it then sees them as music. Guess what iTunes does everytime you play music? Yep, you got it, it starts at the very beginning, now as Julie Andrews said in the sound of Music, it’s a very good place to start, but not when you want to listen to a book where you left off.

Some of you maybe shouting at me right now saying, “yeah, but you can make adjustments in iTunes”, but I can assure you, I have tried and it didn’t always work.
OK, so what did we do, well nothing, until I was pointed to AudioBook Builder that is. I think this has been on the MacReviewCast in the past but not for some time, and we all need reminding at times about really useful software.

So once you’ve installed the Application the welcome screen gives you 3 options, these being Create a new project, open and existing project or help, oh of course there is a quit option as well.
To start off with you’ll be interested only in Create new Project of course. When you click on Create a new project the app asks you to name a file and asks you where to save it to, the app defaults to an Audiobook builder folder within your Music folder in your home directory. This is where I place the files as who needs an argument.
The next part is to enter a title for the book an Author, and finally a Genre, although I only see Audiobooks under that option when first starting off. You can also drag Artwork here as well but in fact you can come back and drag artwork here at any time before you finish the project, you can also rename prior to finishing off as well, so don’t worry at this stage too much about the naming conventions.
At the bottom of the window you’ll see Cover which is where we start but also Chapters and Finish.

Once you have popped your CD in your machine, click onto Chapters and click on import CD, you can also import the current iTunes highlighted item or choose from files on your system. My main use was to import CD’s though. Once the CD has been imported you’re then able to name the Chapter or chapters and then of course if it’s a long book you need to import the other CD’s to complete the book.
Now once you have all your CD’s imported this is where you have to decide how many splits in iTunes you’d like, as you can combine all of those CD’s or spit each of the tracks or even chapters within the book.

Let me tell you what I did for my daughter. She had recently asked if I could put “An Unfortunate Series of Events” onto her iPod. I imported all 13 books which had, at least 3 CD’s per book and sometimes 5. I decided to import all of the CD’s as one book, you have the facility to join and split the files you import in AudioBook Builder. Sometimes moving the files around took a bit of thinking and fiddling but if you do it all in order you’ll have no issues. Now having mentioned that, I did find that after I’d completed the book I had recorded 1 CD and added it at the start of a book and at the end of that same book, but I found it easy to rectify as I’d kept the audiobook file after exporting to iTunes, I re-recorded the correct CD and added it into the correct place within the files, I of course deleted the duplicate file.

I did rename some of the files, but actually I only really had to rename the top file, difficult to explain here but Audiobook Builder gives you a main file into which you have each of the CD’s for an individual book. Once I had finished, and it didn’t take to long, although at first it does seem that the copying process is taking some time, however it seems to suddenly speed up and you’ll soon have all those CD’s copied. So now I had 13 books all with the separate CD’s within the whole series of books. Now it was time to export to iTunes, click on finish and here you have 2 options, they are ‘build book’ and ‘build options’. First click on the build options and here you can adjust the quality of the recording. This impacts the size of the file you end up with, you can change the format from the default M4B which is book markable or M4A. You also have the options to break between files or break between chapters, have equal length or have it split per chapter, this is the option I used. You can experiment here to see how it exports into iTunes and what you’d prefer. The finish window also tells you the title you have given the books or book, the author, genre, also the length, chapters, quality and the destination. You’ll also see the artwork that you’ve used.

So I now have a neatly created book in my audiobooks section of iTunes. Job Done, the only slight glitch I came across was occasionally the application didn’t see a CD I had popped into the disc drive, although it could be seen in iTunes or Finder, however a quick eject and after the CD being pushed back in, the software then saw the CD. Not a big problem, but don’t panic if it happens to you.

The cost of AudioBook Builder is $9.95, £6.99 or €7.72, there are also family packs available at currently at $14.95, £10.50 or €11.60.

You can find the software over at www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder

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