There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to organize your own music using the programs that already come on your computer. Hello, iTunes, iPhoto? I’ve managed to finagle a seriously complex way of fixing exif data and properly organizing my photos in iPhoto but until now haven’t found a way to properly organize my music using iTunes categories. What’s my problem with iTunes? Well, Audiobooks purchased from Audible.com and the iTunes Store are marked so that when moved to your iPod they, naturally, show up under the Audiobooks heading. If you rip your own audiobook from CD iTunes refuses to acknowledge these files as part of an audiobook. Dragging and dropping them into the Audiobooks would seem like the natural solution, unfortunately NO!
There is a solution; if you have the CD, select all the tracks on it, and choose Advanced -> Join CD Tracks. This ensures that all the entire CD is treated as one, long track. If you have already have the files as mp3s you can join them from the command line here. Once you have your single track you’ll need to convert the file to something iTunes as an Audiobook. iTunes Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing -> AAC Encoder. From the Setting menu choose Custom. In the AAC Encoder window choose 64 kbps from the Stereo Bit Rate pop-up menu. Leave the Sample Rate and Channels settings at 44.100kHz and Stereo respectively. Save your settings and close iTunes’ preferences. Convert your large file by choosing Advanced -> Convert Selection to AAC.
After iTunes is finished, select the converted file and choose (on the Mac) File -> Show in Finder or (Windows) File -> Show in Windows Explorer. Select the file and change its extension from .m4a to .m4b. Delete the original track from iTunes and import the new m4b track back into iTunes.
If you’d like an automated solution; Doug has two AppleScripts that work well. First is Make Bookmarkable, even better is the JoinTogether script
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