I check out audiobooks on CD from my local library to put on my iPod. I found a guide at (iLounge that gives complete directions. So I do as they say and all’s well.
The problem comes while playing back. I make a smart playlist for each book. All the chapters are added to the playlist. When I play it back, after each chapter ends it stops, then goes back to menu, and I have to click it back to audiobooks, then the next chapter before it will resume playing. This happens if I play them from the audiobooks menu or the playlist menu.
I want it to continue on to the next chapter without stopping.
I’ve poked around on the iLounge site but it gets so confusing with the ‘help’ threads just linking to more linked threads (an most of the FAQ’s just seemed to address how to bookmark tracks, which I can do, and get them in order, which I can also do) and I couldn’t find an answer to my problem after poking around for an hour or so there, so I thought I’d ask here.
Can you just treat the chapters like songs in an album? I’ve sometimes had trouble with the ordering, but it seems you’ve got that sorted. If you follow artist(author) --> album(book) and start playing the first chapter, the next ones should start automatically.
Songs in a smart playlist will play like you want, so I suspect that you’ve set the type of file to audiobook. Try changing it to a song type and see what happens.
Having said that, I get my audiobooks as downloads from Audible and they play like you want.
If the ‘skip when shuffling’ box is checked for the track and your iPod is set to shuffle then it will return to the main menu after each track. Turning shuffle off on your iPod will let the tracks play in order continuously.
When you rip the CDs there is an option to ‘join tracks’ under the advanced menu. This will give you one long (about 1 hour) track for each CD. If you check off the ‘remember playback position’ box for each track you can pick up where you left off if you stop in the middle of a track.
There are also many programs available (many free) to join mp3s so you can create audiobooks that are only a couple of tracks. Sometimes the iPod has trouble with tracks over 5 hours so that is a good limit if you decide to use mp3 joining software.
I’m trying these suggestions. Anachronsim, I have joined tracks and I use a script to make them bookmarkable. My problem is that the tracks stop dead and it goes back to menu after each track when I want them to continue on to the next track. When I’m driving I don’t want to have to fiddle with my iPod to be able to continue to listen to my book. My tracks are all around 1 hour long.
What I don’t understand is if I make a smart playlist with songs, they will keep playing from that list - they don’t kick it back to menu after each song, like my book tracks do.
I’ve turned shuffle off, changed genre from books & spoken word to none, and am heading out to test now.
I just rip them as normal AAC’s, give them the genre “US-Audiobooks” and they play fine when browsing genres. You can set the options for gapless playback, remember position, and so forth in iTunes. No need for “make bookmarkable” scripts any more.
If you’re insistent on using the “Audiobooks” category in iTunes, though, that won’t work for you. I skip it to remove clutter.
Turning off shuffle when listening to my audiobooks seemed to work. Now the only annoying thing is if I switch from listening to an audiobook to listen to music and then back to the book I need to remember which track I left off from as it goes back to the start of the list and track 1. It remembers where in the last listened to track I was, but I need to manually pick the track.
The audiobook identification, I would presume, assumes that the audiobook is only one or two files. I get my audiobooks from audible.com and only the very long (10+ hours) files get broken up into two files or more. In this situation, it makes sense that you’d want the iPod to stop; just because you’ve finished one book doesn’t necessarily mean you want it to continue automatically to the next.
I do have a couple audiobooks that are split up into hour-long tracks, and I’ve never had a problem with them; but I believe they’re identified as songs, as others have suggested.
Put the tracks in a smart playlist and use the criteria ‘album is “name of book”’ and ‘Playcount is 0’. After you listen to a track it will be removed from the list, the playcount only increases when a track is played to the end.
Exact same problem with classic ipod listening to audio-book. One day it worked fine, next it stopped at end of each track.
Solution that worked for me, was to start a track, press ‘next-track’ then ‘previous-track’ and ipod appeared to realise I wanted to hear more than one track at a time. Now it’s playing on from track-to-track.