Are most book cds WMP files- what kind of files are they? Do most books on CD you buy have DRM? Or do they even qualify for DRM?
Of course, if a file has DRM, you can’t convert it to MP3 or other format that can be used in iTunes and put on your iPod.
I don’t see why they wouldn’t be plain old audio CDs, just as rippable as a music disk. Poking around Amazon’s “Books on CD” section has done nothing to disabuse me of this notion. Usually, if you can put it into a CD player (not a computer) and it plays, then you’ve got a regular audio CD.
Of course, there are some audio CDs with strange auto-loading programs that are designed prevent you from ripping them, and it’s conceivable that you could find a book on CD with such a copy-protection scheme attached. I believe there are ways to circumvent these, but I’m not familiar with the exact steps involved, and even if I did know the moderators wouldn’t look to kindly on me sharing them here.
Most commercial audiobooks on CD are normal audio CD files. You just rip them into iTunes, make a playlist, and load them on the iPod.
You can find some books that are MP3; the ones I have had no copy protection, which may be part of the reason the publisher went out of business.
I have a few books that are Windows Media Audio; I had to download a shareware program to convert them to MP3 to put them in iTunes, because at the time iTunes was not available for Windows, and even today iTunes for Mac does not have the conversion program for WMA.
You can listen to these books on the iPod like any music CD you ripped, but they do not act like audiobooks from Audible or from the iTunes Music store. They don’t bookmark, and the individual tracks will get mixed in if you shuffle. The iPod forums at Apple have a thread on how to re-tag your tracks as audiobooks, but they still get mixed in the shuffle, so I haven’t bothered to try it.
I’ve borrowed many audiobooks from the library, and they have all been standard audio CDs that I ripped as mp3s to play in my portable mp3 player.
Been there, done that!
It worked fine. I just dragged the file name into iTunes. Like a charm.
CD’s are there own file format, as long as they don’t have some sort of DRM (I have not seen a DRM cd audiobook and I have listened to quite a few) you should have no problem ripping them as mp3s and importing them into itunes. You can even use iTunes to rip the CD directly to your library. If you would like iTunes even has an option to ‘join CD tracks’ so you get one track for each CD.
The latest version of iTunes also allows you to save your place in an mp3 file by clicking a checkbox under ‘song info’. With older versions of iTunes you can not save your place in an mp3 file, there is a way to convert the file to be bookmarkable but it is a little complicated, check the forums at www.ipodlounge.com for more info if you want to do this.
If I were to buy more audiobooks, I’d either buy them from Audible or the iTMS. More likely Audible, since Audible’s software makes it easier to burn to a CD by setting up tracks and breaking into CDs for you, which is something iTunes doesn’t seem to do. Of course, this only works if you can download a 100+ MB file easily. The price can vary as well. Some things are much cheaper as a download, others are about the same price as the CD. One option, if you buy a lot of audiobooks, is to get a subscription at Audible and you will generally get a very good deal in comparision to buying them all individually.