Miniaturization - Audio books on an iPod

As I sit here in front of my computer loading another CD of ours into iTunes for subsequent downloading into the iPod, I have to shake my head at the amount of miniaturization that has taken place in the media field. I just finished backing up my iTunes catalog which has almost 400 CDs in it. It took a total of 4 DVD-R disks! That's a 100 to 1 compression ratio in terms of physical media size! And of course it wouldn't be much trouble finding a zip drive which could hold the whole backup and take up less space than the 4 DVDs.

The iPod itself is also a marvel. Being only slightly larger than a cassette tape drive, it will hold another 3,600 albums or the total equivalent of 4,000 of those cassettes. And not only can it hold those cassettes or CDs but it can also play them in several orders or just randomly.

In a slightly different vein, something I've been experimenting with lately is importing audio books onto the iPod. For the longest time, I've been frustrated because it seemed that no matter what I did, the book ended up in the "music" section of the iTunes library. Once I got over that hang-up, everything worked great - at least with version 7 of iTunes. What follows is a lengthy explanation of recording audio CDs into an iPod to facilitate temporary listening. If you don't have an iPod you can probably skip the rest of this posting.

First I considered what the differences are between importing a book and a music CD:

1. You don't need the same hi-fidelity unless the book has some necessary music.
2. The tracks on an audio book will generally not relate to anything in the book
3. There will be many more tracks on the audio book than on a music CD.
4. You probably are more likely to want to start a book from where you left off where on a music CD it doesn't matter much.
5. You probably don't want to hear the book while you're importing.
6. There probably won't be audio book track names to look up, especially since they're meaningless for most audio books.
7. Audio books are usually multi-volume sets and the order of the volumes is very important. With music CDs multi-volumes are less common and the order is less important.
8. Along the same vein, shuffling is sometimes nice for a music CD but is always devastating for an audio book. And finally
9. Music CDs frequently have a 2 second gap between tracks for cuing and separation. Two second gaps on an audio book probably won't be noticed but they aren't necessary either.

So let's suppose you want to import an audio book. You have purchased it on CDs and have them ready to feed into the computer. Before that step, though, let's get iTunes ready.

1. Run iTunes. Select Edit from the top menu, then the Preferences line. Select the Advanced Tab and the Importing sub-tab. Remember the changes you make so you'll be able to undo them later to go back to importing music CDs.
   
• In the first box change the option to Show CD. Otherwise you'll be saying no to a dialog box for every disk you insert.
• In the third box change the option to Spoken Podcast. This will speed up the importing and be sufficiently good quality for the spoken word.
• Uncheck the first and second boxes.
• Click OK
2. Insert CD 1 for the audio book
3. iTunes should sense the disk and display all the tracks with creative names like Track 01, Track 02, etc. Now, so you don't have to perpetuate these multiple tracks, highlight them all, then select Advanced from the top menu and click on the Join CD tracks line. The indication that the tracks are now joined is a line from top to bottom and a single check box for all the tracks. If, for some reason the Join CD Tracks option is greyed out, you'll need to sort the tracks in order by clicking on the track or name column heading.
4. With all the tracks highlighted, right click and select Get Info from the menu. This is the crucial area where you make the distinction between a music CD and an audio book. Make the following changes/entries:
• In the Artist line enter the book's author.In the Album line enter the book's title.
• You may wish to use the Album Artist to list the reader
• Enter the disk number and size of the book like disk 2 of 8, for example
• Enter Audiobook in the Genre box
  
• Select yes on the last three boxes on the last line Yes-remember position; yes-skip when shuffling; and Yes- Make it a gapless album.
• Click OK to close the box.
  
5. Now click the Import button at the bottom of the iTunes frame.
6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 for each disk in the audio book.
7. The imported disks (one track per disk) will appear in Music - accept it , get over it. Because you assigned the genre: audio book you can readily find the imported CDs
   
8. iTunes will group these disks all together making it easy to add cover artwork and sort the disks if necessary.
9. Sync your iPod and you're ready to listen to your audio book on your iPod.
10. Remember to reset your iTunes options to be prepared for the next music CD upload.