Overview

This blog documents how to convert audiobooks on CD to Apple M4B format with chapters and proper tag metadata. You can use the same IpodABC tool to create chaptered audiobooks from aac/m4a or mp3 sources if you prefer.

Ipod's treat audiobooks files specially, and as well as being bookmarkable by default they appear in their own menu structure separate from music and podcasts.

More useful for books is that playback position is retained even if you play some other tracks in the interim, and that chapters can be defined to aid navigation to a particular place

As Apple do not use the mpeg4 standards for chapters there are limited ways to create your audiobooks to similar standards to those you can buy from itunes or elsewhere.

Simple conversions to an audiobook format are possible, (as simple as renaming a file on windows) but unless you can define chapters you either have a huge monolithic file, or have a book as a set of little files that you must play in the right order.

I found useful discussion in various places (see links for some), and two or three commercial tools for doing a decent conversion, but having tracked down suitable tools I decided to document the process.

There are three posts you need to follow.
I) SETUP the tools
II) RIP the CD's to disk (using Foobar2000 & Nero Encoder)
or RIP the CD's to disk (using itunes)
III) CONVERT the files on disk to a single audiobook.

(Last updated December 2009 - posting dates are faked so that you can easily see posts in the archive on the right.)