Chris Pugh

I recently purchased an audiobook that came delivered in MP3 format and wanted to import it into the “Audiobooks” section in iTunes.  What I found was that iTunes does not support audiobooks in MP3 format  and that they need to be converted to AAC/M4B (iPod audiobook) files so that iTunes will treat them as an audiobook.

Benefits gained by converting your MP3 Audiobooks to M4B include:

• Audiobooks appear in the the “Audiobook” section inside iTunes & iPod’s
• Adjustable playback speed to either slow down or speed up the reading
• Ability to Stop/Start without losing your place inside the audiobook

For me, the feature I use most is the ability to resume playback at a particular point even if you play something else or turn the iPod off.  There are many online services (eMusic, Zipidee, TPB etc) where you can obtain audiobooks, but most of them are in MP3, which the iPod just treats as a regular music file.  With a few steps, it is easy to convert MP3 files (or any other filetype that iTunes can play) into the native iPod audiobook format.  I’m sure there are a lot of different methods out there, but the following steps work nicely for me.

Configuring iTunes:

Before you convert the files, you must change the import settings in iTunes.  You should only have to do this once.  Open iTunes and do the following:

Edit > Preferences > General

In the middle of the window, click on “Import Settings”

Make sure “Import Using” is set as “AAC Encoder”.

Change “Setting” to “Custom” and set the following options:

Bit Rate: 64kbs (This should be fine, feel free to adjust higher or lower as you see fit)
Channels: Auto (I leave this on “Auto” as I have found no benefit from converting Mono files to Stereo files for spoken word audiobooks)

Instructions:

Create a new playlist and add the files you want to convert.  Once you have imported the files, select them and right-click, and select “Create AAC Version”.  This will add the newly converted files to your library in AAC format.

Once the conversion is complete, remove the original files from your library.  They will no longer be needed for this process.  You can also remove the newly created AAC files from your library, but when you are asked, be sure to select “Keep Files”, so they are not deleted off your hard drive.

On Windows, the newly created files will be stored in “My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Name of Audio Book”.  Browse to this folder now. You should find the new files with an extension of .m4a, these need to be renamed to .m4b so that iTunes will treat them as an audiobook.  Go ahead and do this now.

Now that the files are renamed, you can add them back into your iTunes library (File > Add File to Library or simply drag and drop).  Right-click on the new file(s) in your library and select “Get Info”.

You’ll want to edit the “artist” and “album” fields so that they display correctly and add artwork if you have it.  You can also change the genre of the files to “Audiobooks” using the iTunes tag editor to make the files easier to find when looking through iTunes.

All you have to do now is sync your iPod/iPhone and you should be good to go.  The new audiobook files will show up under the “Audiobooks” menu on your iPod/iPhone, your playback position will be remembered, and they will not get played during song shuffles.  I have not found an easy way to add chapter marks on a Windows machine yet, if I find an easy to use method I will be sure to make note of it.

I have an older third generation iPod as well as a 3G iPhone and while this method works great for me, I cannot promise that it will work for everyone.  Feel free to contact me if you have any issues or questions.

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