Dealing With Audiobook

Recently I have finished “Anthem”, a rather short novel by Ayn Rand, as recommended by a friend.

The book is obtained from LibriVox (http://librivox.org/anthem-by-ayn-rand/), a volunteer community that recruits people all over the world to read public domain books and then distributes them for free, as in free-of-charge AND DRM-protection free. I am always a supporter of the idea that education and knowledge should be easily available to those who seek them.

Another thing is that, although the iTunes and iPod duo (more accurately the iPhone in my case) supports audiobooks out of the box, the process of putting the audio files together is not trivial.

• (1) You have to go to your file info and change the type to “Audiobook” in order to make them appear in the “Audiobook” tab on iTunes.
• (2) Once sync into your iPod, the files are grouped under one album, much like the CD albums in the Music section. However, if your audiobook is ripped from CD, or obtained from “your favorite sources”, chances are you will get a load of small 5-min MP3 files. Navigating through the multiple files on your iPod and keeping track of your listen is very difficult.

To solve the problem, I did some research and found a paid application call Audiobook Builder from Splasm (http://www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder/). The app costs $10 USD, which is the average price for one audiobook, but the productivity it saves you is worth way more than that. You can stitch multiple MP3 files into one gapless chapter, and bind multiple chapters into one book. It also automatically splits a super long audiobook into multiple parts of your desire length, makes it easy and efficient to transfer the files and store them. Most importantly, since you have one audiobook file (with M4B extension) rather than 96 small MP3 files, the built-in bookmarking can remember where you left off last time and resume from that point next time you listen to it.