It’s no secret that an iPod can do much more than play music. Movies, pictures, and audio books can also be loaded onto your iPod making it more than just an digital music player. In a previous post I described how to rip and load a DVD movie onto your iPod with free software. Now, I want further extend the functionality of an iPod by outlining the process for ripping and loading a CD audio book.

Originally I struggled with how to approach this topic. I wanted to create a short list of simple steps, but soon found that depending on what you wanted to achieve, the total number of steps varied. Also, within each “step” was a list of several little steps, which was making my original idea difficult to layout. The simplest way to present this topic is to describe the basic process knowing that each person will transform what’s presented into a series of steps that best suits their needs. Therefore, I recommend you read the entire article, decide which parts of the process work for your personal preferences, and then create your own list of steps for “importing an audio book into iTunes.” Let’s get started.

Change your iTunes import settings

Most people have their import settings configured specifically for importing music. Everyone has their own personal preference for a bitrate that strikes the ideal balance between file size and audio quality. When it comes to audio books, however, you can strike a good balance with a much lower bitrate setting than what you normally use for music, and iTunes provides a import setting specifically for this purpose.

1. Start iTunes.
2. From the menu bar select Edit -> Preferences.
3. Select the Advanced tab in the dialog box that appears.
4. Select the Importing tab.
5. Make note of your current settings on this screen. You’ll need to return to these settings once your finished importing your audio book.
6. Set the Import Using drop down list to AAC Encoder.
7. Finally, set the Setting drop down list to Spoken Word. This setting will import mono audio at 32 kbps and stereo at 64 kbps.

Note: You can try a “Custom” setting and force a lower bitrate; however, I’ve tried 20 kbps for mono and 40 kbps for stereo and the result had an annoying clipping at the end of words. The preset Spoken Word setting is probably as low as you should go. The audio quality is decent and the file size of a single CD compresses down to approximately 25 MB — not bad for an entire CD of material.

If you want it now, import it like a regular music CD

Audio books CDs are no different than a music CD with the exception that an audio book typically spans several CDs rather than just one. Each CD contains one or more chapters of the book broken down into smaller track sections. Therefore, if you just want your audio book on your iPod as fast as possible, the steps outlined below are all you need.

1. Insert the first CD of the audio set and wait for iTunes to recognize the CD and lists the tracks.
2. If dialog box appears asking you if “you would like to import the CD,” answer yes. If not, just press the Import CD button in the lower right corner of the iTunes window.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each CD in the audio book set.
4. After each CD is imported, select the “Recently Added” playlist. You should see a long list of tracks you just imported at the top of this playlist.
5. Click on the first audio book track. Hold down the shift key and select the last audio book track. This will select all of the tracks that make up the entire book.
6. From the menu-bar select File -> New Playlist from Selection.
7. Accept the name iTunes gives this new playlist or enter your own.
8. Connect your iPod and make sure you have this new playlist selected as a something to sync. If necessary, manually force a sync.
9. As a final step, reset your audio import settings you changed back in the first section of this article from Spoken Word back to your original music import settings. Save your changes.

The benefit of importing audio books this way is that it’s fast and easy. A playlist based on the audio book’s tracks makes sense; however, the track listing is usually long and the final import will NOT appear under the Audiobook section of your iTunes library. Other than those two minor inconveniences, you’re done. Go ahead and start enjoying your audio book.

Fixing a generic track listing import

At some point after you insert a CD into your drive, iTunes will try to “detect” the details of each track on that CD. Normally, the CD details are successfully found in the CDDB (Compact Disk Database — I think). Unfortunately there are times when the CDDB look up is unsuccessful which leaves you with a generic track listing (e.g. track 01, track 02, track 03, etc). Ignore this problem during the CD import process; however, once the import is complete, follow the steps listed below to correct the generic listings:

1. Switch to the Recently Added playlist or the Music library view.
2. Locate the newly imported file(s).
3. Right click on the title and select Get Info from the pop-up menu.
4. Select the Info tab and start manually inserting the information you find useful for each track.

I like enter the book title in the Name and Album fields. I enter the author in the Artist field, the reader in the Composer field, and which disk this is out of the total disks in the Disc Number section. Also, if I’m not “joining” all of the tracks on a single CD (described in the next section), then I need to make sure that Track Number has some unique number for each individual track so the tracks sort correctly.

The CDDB look up isn’t very consistent. Sometimes it will exact CD information, and sometimes it won’t. Other times it will find the information for some of the CDs in the set, but not all of them. Even stranger is when it finds slightly different information of a CD in the set. Whatever information is found, or not, doesn’t matter. You can always manually edit any of the information so that the final listing is something that works well for your needs.

Avoid long track listings by “joining” the contents of a single CD

A typical audio book is made up of a set of CDs. If you import the CDs and make a single playlist for the book as described above, you typically have a very long list of tracks in that playlist. If that bothers you, then you can import all of the contents of a single CD into a single track by “joining” them together during the import process.  Here’s how.

1. Insert the first CD of the audio set and wait for iTunes to recognize the CD and list the tracks.
2. If dialog box appears asking you if “you would like to import the CD,” answer no. You still have a few selections to make before you import the CD

Note: If all goes well, iTunes was able to retrieve all of the necessary title and track information from the CDDB and you will have something that looks like the screen shot shown below.

3. Select the first track in the list, hold down the shift key, and select the last track in the list. Now all of the tracks from the CD are selected
4. From the menu bar select Advanced -> Join CD Tracks. If this option is grayed out, you’ve done something wrong. Try to repeat the above steps to correct the problem. If all went as planned, you should see a thin line along the left side of the track listing and a single check box next to the first track as seen in the screen shot below

5. Press the Import CD button at the lower right corner of the iTunes application. Depending on the size of the CD and the speed of your computer, the import process time will vary. I average between 5 to 10 minutes per import. Keep in mind, the process takes awhile because you’re combining all of the tracks into a single audio file
6. Repeat steps 1 through 5 for each CD in the audio book set

Remember, I’m describing the process for importing an audio book from a CD set, and grouping the audio files into a single track for each CD. This approach basically replicates the CD distribution of the audio book.

At this point you can select all of the “joined” tracks and create a playlist as previously described. Joining tracks leaves you with fewer tracks in the end making the audio book a little easier to manage.

Make your audio book appear in the AudioBook section of the iTunes library

Finally, if you don’t want your audio book in a music playlist, here ’s how to get your newly imported audio book to show up in the AudioBooks section of your iTunes library.

1. Find the newly imported files in your iTunes Music library and right click on one of the files.
2. From the pop-up menu, select Get Info.
3. Click on the Summary tab and look near the bottom for the Where information and make note of the folder location for this file.

Note: iTunes imports CDs in the strangest way, which means a set of related CDs like an audio book don’t always end up in the same location.  You might have to verify the location of each imported CD as described above so you can relocate them to a single location to make the rest of this process easier.

4. Close iTunes and open Windows Explorer.
5. Navigate to the folder location of the imported file.
6. Right click the file and select rename.
7. Change the file extension from m4a to m4b.
8. A dialog box pops up warning you about changing the file name. Just answer yes when prompted.
9. Repeat steps5 through 8 for each file that makes up the entire audio book CD set.

If you don’t see the file extension in Windows Explorer, you’ll need to rename the file from the good old command prompt (a.k.a DOS prompt):

1. Click on the Windows Start button.
2. Find and click on Run.
3. In the pop-up box type “command.com” and press enter.
4. The command prompt window opens.
5. From here, type “CD <complete path to the folder that contains your file>” and press enter.
6. Once you have reached the correct folder (a.k.a directory), type “DIR” and press enter to confirm that the file you want to rename is where you think it is.
7. If the file shows up in the directory listing, type “RENAME <complete file name>.m4a <complete file name>.m4b“. Notice that you are simply changing the file extension from “m4a” to “m4b“. That’s all. If you have some or all of the files in this folder, you can change all of the extensions at once by typing, “RENAME *.m4a *.m4b” and press enter.
8. Type “DIR” and press enter to verify that all of the audio book files have the new extension “m4b”.

Once you change the file extensions the track listing in iTunes will no longer work.  To correct the problem, and to get the audio book to appear in the Audiobook section in iTunes, follow the steps listed below:

1. Start iTunes.
2. Locate the track listing for the previously imported audio book CDs.
3. Select these tracks and press delete.
4. Click the Remove button in the confirmation dialog. This action simply removes the “pointers” to the original files, which no longer exist since we just renamed them all.
5. From the menu bar select File -> Add Folder to Library.
6. Navigate through your folder structure until you reach the folder that contains all of the individual audio book files
7. Click OK.

iTunes will import each file and you should know see an Audiobook icon appear under your library listings. Click on this icon and now your newly imported audio book is right where it belongs — in the Audiobook section of your iTunes library.

Final important step — putting everything back

To maximize disk and iPod space, I walked you through the process of changing your import settings. Now that you’re done importing your audio book, return to the first section of this article and revert all of your import settings to what you had originally. If you fail to execute this final step, the next music CD you import will sound terrible.

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Filed under: How-To & Tech Tips