Some Confusion

[Dasffion]

Sorry if this has been answered before but I've spent several hours staring at this site and others trying to find an exact answer to my questions.

So here's the issue. I have a bunch of audiobooks on my computer and ipod, about 100 GB worth. I've been listening to them from the music section and that works fairly well, I just find the author then the book and listen. I don't really care about bookmarking, I don't switch from one book to another.

The other day I realized that I could, in Itunes, switch the media type and it would move the book into the Audiobook section so I went ahead and did this for all my books making my music section only contain music. I was so stoked...until I synced my iPod and realized that it's completely unusable this way since every chapter is listed and in order of chapter name, not all of which have the book name in the title as this wasn't a problem listening from the music section. It looks very nice on iTunes but horrible on my ipod.

So here's my question. Is it worth it to convert these thousands of files to AAC then converting the file names to m4b or am I better off just moving them back to the Music section? Mostly I want to know if I do these conversions if it will list the audiobooks in the iPod like it does in iTunes (Books alphabetically by author) or if it will continue to have all the chapters listed.

Thanks

[cjmnews]

First off there is no need to convert to m4b anymore. The alteration of media type handles all the benefits of changing to m4b for you. I only do this to have 2 copies of the same book on 2 iPods (e.g.: the latest Harry Potter or Twilight books) where each iPod can track their own bookmarks.

Second is just a sorting problem. The Audiobook section has an odd sorting mechanism, and I don't think there is a way to change it to be correct, though I may be wrong on that. What I do is make Playlists for each audiobook. Playlists can be sorted to any order you would like, then you can right click the playlist name and choose Copy to Play Order. You may have to set Disk and Track numbers to get the sorting perfect, but I think you would have that done already since it was working in the Music section.

I have a post on how I create my playlists for my family, and there is a follow up post on how to do it without a playlist per audiobook. For myself I use a modified version of the follow up post. Audiobook playlist on iPod
I have modified my family playlists to include Media Type is Audiobook to make the playlists show up in the iTunes iPod Book tab and not in the Music tab.

Hopefully this helps you.

[Dasffion]

Originally Posted by cjmnews

First off there is no need to convert to m4b anymore. The alteration of media type handles all the benefits of changing to m4b for you. I only do this to have 2 copies of the same book on 2 iPods (e.g.: the latest Harry Potter or Twilight books) where each iPod can track their own bookmarks.

Second is just a sorting problem. The Audiobook section has an odd sorting mechanism, and I don't think there is a way to change it to be correct, though I may be wrong on that. What I do is make Playlists for each audiobook. Playlists can be sorted to any order you would like, then you can right click the playlist name and choose Copy to Play Order. You may have to set Disk and Track numbers to get the sorting perfect, but I think you would have that done already since it was working in the Music section.

I have a post on how I create my playlists for my family, and there is a follow up post on how to do it without a playlist per audiobook. For myself I use a modified version of the follow up post.
I have modified my family playlists to include Media Type is Audiobook to make the playlists show up in the iTunes iPod Book tab and not in the Music tab.

Hopefully this helps you.

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks for the answer. I just went ahead and moved them back to Music and applied Genres to each Author so I can easily find them. The music section already sorts them into Author(artist) and Books(album) for me so creating playlists would be a waste of time.

I wish Apple would work on this though, it'd be really nice to have my Ipod sort my Audiobooks like Itunes does. I'm surprised they haven't. Trying to find an answer to this I've seen complaints back to 2004 about the same thing.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer.