Syncing Audio Books to iPod Classic [5289]

[markan]

Hi

I got an iPod classic for Christmas to replace my aging iRiver H340 and so far it is working really well. However I am having some slight issues with the syncronisation (with MM3) of audio books. Steps below:

- tag the audio book with the audio book genre
- this removes it from the music tab on the sync options and puts it in the book tab
- select the books on the audio book tab (they are unselected by default)
- sync the iPod

Unfortunately the audio books then dont' appear on the iPod, either as books or albums. Am I missing something? The areas that I thought of but can't see the issue are:

- does the transcoding work wiith audio books?
- perhaps this simply excludes them as music but doesn't include them on the iPods audio book menu?

Any thoughts welcome! Blinding job with MM3 by the way

[metarie]

I've had moderate success with audiobooks on the ipod classic, but it doesn't seem to work very well in my opinion.

I moved my audiobooks to a new folder on my disk, seperate from my music folders. Then from MM's iPod sync options -> Audiobooks tab, check this folder so that MM knows where to pull your books from, then just auto-sync away! (If you don't want to do a full auto-sync cuz it copies all your music all over again, then just make sure you uncheck all the music folders from the same ipod sync options -> Music tab (and make sure you deselect the option that deletes files from the iPod if they're not on the auto-sync list ))

My problem is that once on the ipod, it will treat each track as a seperate book, rather than using the "album" name as the book name and then each "track" name as the chapter name. So I've stuck all my mp3's together to make one long 2.5 hour mp3 file! Not great, but the ipod remembers where you left off if you stop listening part-way through, which is quite neat.


Mark

[metarie]

P.S. Sorry, but I'm thick and I don't know what "transcoding" is, so can't help there. But I can confirm that the audiobooks I've sync'd are included in the ipod's audio book menu.

Weirdly I also had a issue with one of them not displaying the artwork for it, even tho when you view the contents of the ipod through MM, the artwork will be displayed... still investigating this one.

[markan]

It looks like that fixed it. I had to select the tracks both under the artist and the location for them to be picked up. I had assumed that selecting wither would get them.

Thanks

[ibo]

I am quite new to MM.

Yesterday I just received a new ipod classic 80gb, and I want to use it for audiobooks. I did a test and transfered few audiobooks as the firs poster wrote, but each track is shown as a separate audiobook in the audiobook folder on the ipod and I can not play them in order.
I had to change the genre to speech and the audiobook show up in the music folder but it can play in correct order.

Is there any way to make them show up correctly in audiobooks folder?

[metarie]

Have you ever tried syncing an audiobook through iTunes? Wondered if the results are different. Personally, I've never tried it... but I don't have any intention to neither. I'm satisfied enough with the way that MM works, even tho it doesn't seem very clever.

[ibo]

I decided to uninstall the itune, after only one day on my PC. That kind of software trash has no place on my HDD. Also I dislike to have to do all that renaming and conversion jumpingtruough hoops, cause all my audiobooks, more than 40GB are in mp3 format.

Until another solution become available, I converted all audiobooks tag to Speech, marked Book in album tag and decided to forget about bookmarking for now

[oistein]

I would like the audio books to end up in the audio book menu on my ipod, but I haven't taken the time to combine all the mp3's of my books to "single book files"... The best bet in my opinion was to sync all music as usual, but keep the audio books in a separate folde. After that, I sync the audio books manually.

The reason the MM3 won't pick up my books is probably because I 've tagged the genre tag with "audio book". Name it "speech" (like mentioned before) and MM3 will sync audio books just like normal MP3's. They will end up in your music menu, though.

Cheers.

[oistein]

according to http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... audio+book

the software at http://www.freeipodsoftware.com/ipodaud ... atures.php should solve the problemes. It says on the website that you can't put mp3's under the "Audio book"-menu item on your iPod.

Haven't tried it yet, but just thought I will supply and repeat the tip. Will try it later.

[kdpman]

I have the iPod Classic 120GB firmware version: 2.0.1 PC and it works great with music. Audiobooks, not so good. I have my books tagged:
title: xx of XX
Album: Book title
Artist: Author
Genre: Audiobooks

I copy the files I want to sync in a separate audiobook area and sync. The files show up under Audiobooks on the main menu. However, they all appear as tracks and the Album (title) is not shown at all. For example:
01 of 12 James Axler. Except, I have a lot of the same author and a lot of the books have 12 files. So, I see this same thing over and over.

Seems like others have had the same problem. Any resolution?

[rusty]

I've been testing with MM 3.1.0.1222 and haven't been able to find any problems that don't already exist with iTunes and the iPod.

Specifically: we tested with the iPod 2G, 3G, and iPhone and found that on both 2G and 3G devices, Audiobook tracks synced with iTunes appear on the device sub to Artist and aren't grouped by Album.

I was able to replicate that behavior with MediaMonkey, but couldn't replicate any problem in which an Audiobook track didn't appear on the device.

-Rusty

[Phreaker47]

I had basically the same issues and found this thread. Bottom line: When tagged right, MM detects audiobooks properly (even if they are in the same subfolder with your music), but when you sync them to an ipod classic and view them all the tracks from the different books show up all jumbled together.

That's pretty lame... do I understand correctly that this is an ipod problem for which there is no solution? That's ridiculous... I don't want to consolidate these things into single tracks.

[rusty]

Hi,

If my analysis is correct, then it's an issue with the iPod/iPhone firmware that MM cannot fix.

-Rusty