Audible Book Annotations/"Liner Notes" in iTunes

[moriond]

There's often a need to keep track of more information about an audio book than can easily be handled by tags and comment fields. Audible downloads of story collections, sometimes with multiple authors and readers, are one obvious example. Audio travel guides come with maps, as do some historical books. And spoken word recordings such as plays and poetry collections also benefit from detailed listings of their contents with time markers to help listeners navigate through the material.

If you've made these kinds of notes and saved them as pdf (Adobe's Portable Document Format) files you can add them to your iTunes library and playlists as stated in this article Double-clicking on the file in iTunes (4.7 and above) displays the file in your default pdf viewer. You can add tags the same way you do for audiobooks and songs. Doug Adams has written a PDF Adder AppleScript for Macs that lets you select an iTunes library entry you want to associate with the pdf file being added and copy the tags to it. So your Liner Notes for My Album pdf file will show up in the same searches that bring up your My Album entries. The article linked above notes that iTunes recognizes these are not music files, so they will not be copied to your iPod (and occupy space) when you synch or manually download. You can add these to playlists, or create a smart playlist My Liner Notes by specifying Kind is pdf.

Making pdf files on a Mac is just a matter of selecting Save as PDF when you print any file. Under Windows, free solutions for creating PDF files can be found by doing a Google search with the terms ghostscript redmon free and pdf or take a look at GhostWord on SourceForge for more elaborate free options.

Apart from the obvious uses of liner notes, lyrics, libretti, and sheet music, here are a few ideas for audiobook-specific and other non-music uses:

• Add maps for travel guides (Audible links pdf maps for a few of these; now they can be stored in iTunes with the audiobook)
• Annotate your progress with language tapes; keep track of of sticky points, the section with menu translations, or that lesson with really useful phrases
• If you've recorded lectures and ported them into iTunes, keep your notes attached to them
• Some audiobook publishers keep web sites so you can access maps, illustrations, historical timelines and photos from the book. Store the link addresses. Even better, if you're using software or a text processor that can make interactive pdf, put the links into the document so the web pages appear when you click them in the pdf document.
• Make your own set of book links:
  1) Store author interviews
  2) Add photographs to travel narratives, accounts of exploration, or historical events
  3) Read epic works and classics on the web as you listen to these accounts; some of these pages may link to notes with explanatory material
  4) Note fan web sites and discussion boards for popular works such as Stephen King's Dark Tower and George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice for resources such as lists of characters, genealogy, maps and timelines
  5) Supplement your listening of series programs by linking to the schedule or program overview page, for example, for the free Audible downloads of the discussions hosted by the Library of Congress on The Digital Future

This is another nice feature from iTunes to enhance your listening.

Edited to modify Subject heading to "Audio Book Annotations" to better reflect the new forum title (was Audible.com + iPod, now Books and Spoken Word)

[Podunk]

Damn! That is excellent!!!!

[dordale]

Cool, I'll be checking this out-Thanks Moriond!

For anyone running windows, a great pdf writer is cute pdf writer. It's available for free from:

http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.asp

All the program does is install another print driver on your system. To save your document as pdf, just print it, but change the printer destination to the "CutePDF Printer". The program will then come up with a dialog box, asking where you want to save your pdf file to. I use it all the time--it works great!

dordale