Making Your Own Audio books for iPods

If you have audio books on CD, you can rip them to use in iTunes and on your iPod. To get the most out of these audio books, you need to choose a format for importing, join any tracks on the CD, and make the files bookmark able. We look here at all three of these actions.

1. Choosing a format for importing. By default, iTunes uses 128 kbps AAC for importing music. But spoken word recordings don’t need the same high level of quality as music does - people don’t mind a hint of scratchiness in a voice, so when you are going to rip audio books, you can change the format to save space. Open the iTunes preferences (iTunes > Preferences on Mac; Edit > Preferences on Windows, and click the Importing tab.

If the Import Using menu doesn’t show AAC Encoding, click that menu and select AAC Encoding. (If you want to listen to your audio books on other devices that can’t play AAC files, choose MP3, but you won’t be able to create bookmark able files with this format.) Next, from the Setting menu, select Custom. From the Stereo Bit Rate menu, select 64 kbps. This is the same bit rate that Audible and the iTunes Music Store use. Leave the other settings as they are. (After you finish ripping your audio books, reset the format to is original settings; you don’t want to rip music at this bit rate.)

2. Join tracks and import your CD. Insert a CD containing an audio book in your computer, and iTunes in most cases will find the appropriate information about the disc and its contents. While most audio books have many files, it is better to join them into a single track - this allows you to make these tracks bookmark able and listen to your audio books more easily on the iPod. To do this, select all the tracks on the CD (Command-A on Mac; Control-A on Windows), then select Advanced > Join CD Tracks. iTunes displays the tracks with a bracket showing that they are joined.

Import the CD by clicking the Import button, and repeat this for all the CDs of your audio book.

3. Make the Files Bookmark able. The final thing to do is to make the tracks bookmark able. If you’re on a Mac, check out this AppleScript which does this conversion in a jiffy. If you use Windows, locate the tracks (right-click on a track and select Show Song File), then change the files’ extensions from .m4a to .m4b. (If you don’t see extensions, select Tools > Folder Options, click the View tab and uncheck Hide Extensions.)

After you’ve done this, your audio books are ready to sync to your iPod. You can set up play lists for them, or just leave them in your library as they are. It’s a good idea to check their genre to make sure they say Audio book or Spoken Word so it’s easy to find them. (You can change the genre by selecting a file or files, then selecting File > Get Info, clicking the Info tab and choosing a genre from the Genre popup menu.)

Listening to Audio books on your iPod

When you sync audio books to your iPod, they show up in one of two places. If your files are bookmark able, as discussed above, they appear in the Music > Audio books menu automatically, even if their genre is not Audio books. They also appear by genre, artist or “song”. If they are not bookmark able files, you’ll have to search for them from these latter menus.

You play audio books on the iPod like any other type of audio file, but audio books (again, bookmark able files), give you an extra option: go to the iPod’s Settings menu and select Audio books; this lets you choose a different speed for the playback. You can choose Faster or Slower if you want to change the speed of a droll or hyper reader; this plays the file back at a different speed, without changing the voice. You’ll notice some distortion, but in most cases this is not a problem.

You can also make this change as you’re listening to an audio book. After it starts playing, press the Select button three times. Run your finger around the scroll wheel clockwise to change the speed to Faster; scroll the other way to return to Normal, or to change to Slower.