The literary effect—we talk of eBooks and Kingles but one of the easiest way to squeezing a
good book during a vacation or a commute is listening to audio books on your iPod or iPhone.
You can download audio books online using services like iTunes or Autoble but sometimes it's
cheaper to get your books on CD and to rip the manual. Unfortunately there’s about a dozen
ways for this to go wrong. So I'm going to show you one of the best ways I found for getting
audio CDs into iTunes and unto the iPod.
First, put the CD into your computer and launch iTunes. The iTunes automatically prompts you,
asking you if you like to import the CD, say no. we’ve got a few things we've got to do first. The
CDs should show up here in the left column of iTunes. Hopefully you’ll see all the correct
information of the CD with the track, title and artists info. But audio books are notorious for
having bad or inconsistent data even from disk to disk. I'll show you how to fix this later.
Next, open up your iTunes preferences and under import settings, select AAC from the drop
down menu and select spoken podcast. This is technically a low quality setting but it's been
optimized specifically for voice so you’ll never get the difference. These were changes this as
after dealing with six to 10 CD audio book, this will significantly cut down the time it takes to
encode each CD. Still, don’t forget to change it back to your original setting once you're finished
or the next music CD you rip could sound a little funky.
Now having a six CD audio book broken up into hundred of tracks on your iPod, this is a recipe
for trouble. So I'm going to show you how to rip each CD as a single file. Pull down the shift key
and select the first and last track of the CD. This should highlight all of the tracks. You could do
the same thing by selecting the first track and going to the edit menu and using select all. Put all
the tracks in your CD selected, go to the advanced menu and select join CD tracks.
You’ll notice that all the tracks of your CD shift to the right slightly, it has a line on the left that
connects them all together. Now hit the import CD in the bottom right corner. iTunes is now
ripping the CD to your computer as a single file. Eject the CD once it's done and do the same
process for the remaining CDs in your collection. Out in the CD, select all the tracks, tell iTunes
to join the tracks and then hit import.
Once all the CDs have been imported, the easiest way to find them is by clicking on the recently
added playlist gaffed into iTunes. Default should be ready to top. Now, let’s make sure all the
files have correct information and playback on your iPod in the right order. Selecta a little bit the
tracks you’ve just ripped and select get info from the file menu or by right clicking with your
mouse.
In info pane, you should see artist and album info with services, author and title. If it's not in
there, you can plug it in. you also see track number and disk number info. You have to enter this
on a track by track basis but it's worth it to make sure that the book plays each track in the
correct order. Just keep doing this for six to 10 tracks instead of hundreds. If you found out later
that the iPod is playing choppy or is out of order, this is the setting to go back to untweak.
Now go to the option setting and make sure that the media kind is designated as audio book. Do
remember position setting is check and skip shuffling is set to yes. Changing these settings will
put the files in the iTunes audio book directory. Ensure that playback is automatically
bookmarked and prevent a chapter of time and punishment from popping on a party shuffle.
Finally, get your audio unto your iPod. Connect your iPod to your computer and simply drag and
drop the book from the audio book section of iTunes and on to the iPod icon. So that’s how to
properly rip an audio book from a CD to your iPod. That is easy as downloading books form
iTunes but the savings could be worth it. For cnet.com, I'm Donald Bell.
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