philmophlegm: (Fleetwood Mac)
philmophlegm ([personal profile] philmophlegm) wrote2010-04-11 03:10 pm
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Importing Audiobooks, comedy shows and dramas from CD to iTunes

I post this here as much to remind me of how you do it as any other reason, but it might be of use to someone else.

Before doing anything, adjust the iTunes settings so the CD doesn't start importing straight away. This is done by going into the “Preferences” menu and selecting “Ask to import CD” about a third of the way down the page.

Insert the audiobook CD.

Access the track names via the Gracenote database by connecting to the internet.

Select all the tracks, then click on the “Advanced” menu. Select “Join CD tracks”. A long vertical line will appear down the side of the tracks connecting them all together.

Click on “Import CD”. Once all the tracks have been imported, the CD will appear in the music library as a single track.

Select the track in the music library and press Ctrl+I. Go into "Info" and make any necessary changes to the track name and details. Make sure the genre is “Books & Spoken”.

Switch to “Options” and tick “Remember playback position” and “Skip when shuffling”. Not only will this allow the user to always come back to an audiobook exactly where they left off, it will ensure it never becomes an unwelcome guest in the middle of a party shuffle.

Finally, change “Media Kind” from “Music” to “Audiobook”. This will ensure the imported CD ends up in the category where it belongs, rather than cluttering up the music library.

Click on "Audiobooks" in the library menu on the left hand side of the screen. The import should be there, ready to play.

[identity profile] philmophlegm.livejournal.com 2010-04-11 09:16 pm (UTC)(link)
One more thing. You might, just might, have to re-tag some of the .mp3 files so that iTunes plays them in the right order. This will be the case if you're ripping something that has several instances of "Chapter 1". An example of this is Taruithorn's Lord of the Rings dramatic reading, which Foradan converted to .mp3 format years ago. A clever way round this is to use a batch file renamer (like den4b's freeware Renamer) to rename all the files as something sensible (e.g. "The Fellowship of the Ring Book 1 - 1"), then use Mp3Tag (also freeware) to convert those filenames to tags.