iPod Audiobook Problem Solved!

I use my iPod more than most gadgets. It’s kind of surprising to realize it, but I listen to my iPod more than I watch TV these days. With my bad eyes, the iPod has allowed me to read a lot more books than I was able to get through previously, and audiobook-listening has supplanted TV-watching for me.

Long-time blog readers know that I even use the TextAloud program to make my own mp3 audiobooks, such as from texts available online at Project Gutenberg.

I also download audiobooks from Audible.Com.

But there’s been a problem.

For a long time my iPod seemed to behave erratically with regard to whether it would pick up where I left off in the middle of an audiobook. Sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn’t.

I could always get it to pick up at my stopping point if I didn’t do anything else with the iPod. For example, if I was listening to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and I hit "Pause" then I could come back and hit "Play" and it would resume where I’d stopped listening.

But Dracula is 14 hours long, and I didn’t want to commit to using my iPod for nothing but Dracula-listening until I’d worked my way through the whole book. I’d want to use it to read Dracula a bit at a time over a few days, while listening to other things in the interim–you know, the way you’d put down dead tree book of Dracula and read something else for a while. I’d want to listen to music, or shift to a different audiobook, or go from fiction to non-fiction for a while. I didn’t want to have to devote my iPod exclusively to Dracula for the few days it’d take me to get in 14 hours of listening.

Yet if I migrated away and listened to something else, I’d lose my place in Dracula! Upon going back to it, I’d have to use the clickwheel to navigate back to where I thought I was in the book (and then re-listen to at least the last few minutes).

But I wouldn’t lose my place with other audiobooks. They’d pick up right where I left off, no trouble at all.

So I had a puzzle: Why would I lose my place with some audiobooks and not others?

I thought it was something I was doing: Hitting the wrong button or something (e.g., the center wheel button instead of "Play"), but I researched it and found that my actions were not the problem. It has to do with the way the iPod handles different file types, and–best of all–there is an EASY FIX.

Basically, there are certain file formats that iTunes/an iPod recognizes as audiobooks and treats accordingly. It therefore remembers where you were in these file types. But mp3 (the format I use for my homemade audiobooks) is NOT one of those file formats. Because people use mp3 for songs–which are usually short and not the kind of thing people want to pick up in the middle of–the software automatically thinks "song" rather than "audiobook" and doesn’t bother remembering where one was–even if the "song" is 14 hours long!

That’s why I’d lose my place in SOME audiobooks (ones in mp3 format) but not OTHERS (like the ones from Audible, which are in a proprietary format that iTunes recognizes as an audiobook).

The first research I did on the Web indicated that the solution to this would be to laboriously convert all of my mp3 audiobooks into another format and then change the file extensions so that iTunes would recognize them as audiobooks, and I really was not looking forward to that, given how many of these things I have, but I discovered that there is a MUCH EASIER SOLUTION.

Basically–at least in the current version of iTunes (version 6.0)–all you have to do is this:

1. Click on the file you want to have treated as an audiobook (it doesn’t matter what the format is).
2. Right-click and select "Get Info"
3. Go to the "Options" tab.
4. Select "Remember playback position."
5. Click "Okay."

And you’re done! iTunes will then start putting an electronic bookmark at the place you left off and resume there when you go back to the book.

Here’s a picture of what the relevant dialog box looks like (click to enlarge):

Ipodtip2_1

Now, you’ll note that at the bottom of the dialog box there are buttons labelled "Previous" and "Next."

These are EXTREMELY handy, because they allow you to quickly go through an entire playlist of files (or chunk of your library) you want to do this to. Thus if you have a whole bunch of mp3s in a row that you want to audiobook, all you have to do is select "Next" and then "Remember playback position" and then "Next" again until you’re done, at which point you hit "Okay." It only takes a few minutes to whip through a long playlist that way, since you don’t have to go to the hassle of selecting the file and then doing "Get Info" and "Options" each time.

You can also select "Skip when suffling" so that you don’t have audiobooks turning up in the random rotation when you’re listening to randomized songs, but I use the shuffle feature so seldomly that I haven’t bothered to do that yet.

One nice thing about the bookmark is that it transfers between iTunes and the iPod. This means you can start listening to the book in iTunes (say, as soon as you’ve created it) and then when you transfer it to the iPod the bookmark will go with it, so dialing it up on the iPod will result in you picking up where you left off in iTunes.

Cool!

And thus is solved one of my major headaches.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

21 thoughts on “iPod Audiobook Problem Solved!”

  1. Awesome.
    Can anyone help me with this annoyance? It happens on my own iPod which I use w/ a Mac and my husband’s iPod which he uses with a PC & Windows XP. (We both synch our iPods with iTunes).
    We subscribe to a lot of podcasts. Podcasts do show up in their own category, as they should. But individual podcast shows also appear in the Music/Songs directory. That means when we shuffle music (i.e. Songs) to play, every once in a while our iPods will start playing a podcast! But we only want to hear music. We don’t want podcast shows and musical songs to both be under “Songs”. Is this a bug or is there a workaround to suit our preference to keep music and podcasts separate?
    Oh and related to this: If we have a music video for Group X, it’ll also be in the artist’s playlist if we are trying to listen to only the songs for Group X. Somehow the music video will be in the same list as the other songs from Group X. This happens even though there is a separate menu listing for Music Videos. TIA!

  2. The librivox project (www.librivox.org) has volunteers creating public-domain (as in free) recordings of public-domain works. Their library’s not that extensive (yet), but it might be worth keeping an eye on. And it might be worth volunteering, too.

  3. Great tip, Jimmy. This has been a pain in the neck for me for a while, and I’d always chalked it up to assumed limits of my Shuffle (which can really take forever to FF to find your place again in a long book).

  4. Thanks, Jimmy — this was always a pain for me, too — and I’d just memorize the minutes marker where I left off in case my iPod didn’t remember for me. I’ll do this now.
    You’re always a wealth of information!

  5. “Thus if you have a whole bunch of mp3s in a row that you want to audiobook, all you have to do is select “Next” and then “Remember playback position” and then “Next” again until you’re done, at which point you hit “Okay.” ”
    There is a script available that allows you to SELECT a whole list and it will automatically change this setting. I believe it is here:
    http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts02.php?page=2#selectedtracksbookmarkable
    It works VERY well and I use it all the time.

  6. Thanks jimmy. I purchased nextup a while back on your recommendation and have been working through hughes’s church history. This will make it a whole lot easier.

  7. Yeah that change in 6.0 was a great improvement, since I also listen to many converted books and texts.
    But even in previous versions there was a way to do this. Convert the mp3 to AAC, iTunes native formation, then rename the extention from m4a to m4b. The b just stands for bookmarkable.
    One thing I do wish they would do in iTunes in this regard is that they would allow you to mark multiple files with “Remember Playback Position.” Right now if you add multiple files that you want to do this to you have to do each one individually.

  8. Thanks, Jimmy!!! I was totally unaware that this was part of the most recent iTunes version. I haven’t taken the time to install it yet – way too busy.
    I haven’t even had time to put some new CDs I’ve purchased on my iPod yet.
    Anyway, this’ll be a real help!

  9. Note that most of the other hard disk based MP3 players do remember last MP3 position. Apple has been late in the game because it likes to promote AAC files for this purpose which have always had this feature.
    The best hard disk player for audio books (even though it did not have audible support) was the old Rio Karma. It allowed you to have bookmarks which saved not only your position in a file but also the position in a playlist, the volume setting, EQ setting, whether the playlist was random or sequential. Also the Karma did not have as many problem the iPod has with VBR files.

  10. Thanks for a great tip! I listen to audiobooks extensively when doing housework, sewing, cooking, (all those mom things). It’s great having someone read to me when my eyes have to be elsewhere. If you’ve been listening to a book on the iPod and then want to listen to it in iTunes you can just plug the iPod into the computer and play the audiobook from iTunes where you left off.
    Another thing I would really like to see is for iTunes to allow you to create multiple bookmarks on one audiobook.

  11. @Karen
    On older iPods, there was no option to “shuffle songs” directly from the main menu, so you had to enable shuffle in the settings, and then play. My suggestion would be to create a smart playlist set to ‘Artist’ and ‘is not’ for each podcast subscription. The advantage of the smart playlist is that no matter how much music you add, it is automatically included in the smart playlist as long as its artist name is not excluded. Just add each podcast’s author as you subscribe to new ones to the playlist’s rules and you should have the problem solved, except being to access directly from the main menu. You could also experiment with the smart playlists to fix your other annoyance.

  12. @Karen
    If you happen to look at this thread again, in the same place that Jimmy pointed out for bookmarking, there is an option to skip the track when shuffling. That’s probably more convenient overall, but I think the smart playlists will be quicker to set up, especially if you have a lot of podcasts, since you can only flag one track at a time to be skipped or bookmarkable.

  13. A person can name his organization anything he wants. For example, I came across a group called the “evangelical catholic church,” which claimed that it espoused the principles of true Lutheranism. The word “catholic” (lower case) merely means universal, and nothing more. As the term “Catholic Church” is customarily thought of, however, to say that a group is “Catholic” and not in communion with the Pope in Rome is a non sequiter. We Eastern Catholics are in communion with Rome, but as we prefer to say, the Pope is in communion with us!

  14. Anyone know how to add the “album playlist”again when you deleted it with an external program?

  15. HI
    Thanks for that tip – I had spent months trying to sort that problem out without success- much appreciated

  16. I am trying to convert an audio book I have so I can listen to it on my Ipod.. I keep getting this error when trying to convert with Ipod AudioBook
    .1 Date : Sat, 17 Feb 2007 21:16:06 -0500
    2.2 Address: 7C910F29
    2.3 Module : ntdll.dll
    2.4 Type : EAccessViolation
    2.5 Message: Access violation at address 7C910F29 in module ‘ntdll.dll’. Read of address 00000000.
    can anyone tell me what this is and how to get rid of it? sadly I cant get anything but dial up in my area so downloading audio books is not an option.. I thought this program would really be a life saver so I could convert ones I had purchased and some of my favorites.. so far.. all I am is frustrated.. please help!
    Thank you
    Angela

  17. Really got a great information in your website. Its really awesome. Here is website which allow you to hear for yourself the fantastic quality of our Audio books.Simply Download any or all of the Titles below and listen completely free.
    Free AudioBooks

  18. video chat porno com
    video chat porno espana
    video chat porno gratis
    video chat porno sms
    video chat sexo
    video chat sexo casero
    video chat sexo com
    video chat urbanic webcam
    video chat webcam gratis
    video chat xxx espanol
    video chica msn webcam
    video chica webcam
    video chica webcam msn
    video chicas webcam
    video clips porn
    video clips xxx
    Si se pudiera realizar un catastro de toda la producción fotográfica realizada en el mundo desde que el invento de Daguerre revolucionó el campo de las imágenes, probablemente nos encontraríamos con que el tema fotográfico más dominante entre las miles de copias en papel o en el entramado binario de los pixeles es, sin lugar a duda, la pornografía.
    Su sistema de archivo fue infantil, pero enmarcado en el contexto de la manía taxonómica típica del siglo XIX, que reflejaba una de sus grandes utopias, el positivismo: apropiarse del mundo al nombrarlo, aplicando infinitas etiquetas tautológicas que explicaban nada. La utilidad jurídica del archivo fotográfico de Vidocq, al que podríamos llamar jurídico-sexual, no sirvió tanto como registro jurídico, sino como registro antropológico.
    video de webcam porno
    video de webcam sex
    video dela webcam
    video erotico cam
    video erotico gratis webcam
    video grabado webcam gratis
    video gratis cam
    video gratis captura webcam
    video gratis web cam
    video gratis webcam
    video gratis webcam erotica
    video gratis webcam porno
    video guarra cam
    video hidden cam
    video messenger webcam
    video messenger webcam chica
    video mpg chica webcam
    video msn webcam
    video personal cam
    video porno chat
    video porno webcam
    video puta cam gratis
    video robado web cam
    video robado webcam
    video sample webcam
    video sexo webcam
    video sexy webcam
    “Las personas dejan de masturbarse cuando inician relaciones sexuales”.
    “Los hombres comienzan a masturbarse antes que las mujeres”.
    ?Conoces todo sobre el sexo? Contrario a lo que mucha gente piensa, el sexo no es solamente coito y masturbación; este fascinante tema encierra muchos datos curiosos que te sorprenderán.
    ?Qué son las fantasías? Ficciones creadas por nuestra mente en forma consciente. Llana y concreta, así es la definición de la fantasía, uno de los rasgos humanos más artificiosos y abstractos. La capacidad de emplear palabras, símbolos y recuerdos dirigidos a fomentar las fantasías surge en la infancia; y desde entonces, en menor o mayor medida según las fomentemos, las fantasías nos acompan~arán el resto de nuestra vida.
    ?Te gustaria conocer nuestras webcam porno estrella?… Sin duda son de las webcams amateur mas visitadas de nuestra web y es por eso que hemos creado un nuevo acceso hacia ellas en este articulo… Para aquellos que aun no conozcan estas webcams, en
    video sms webcam
    video strip cam
    video striptease web cam
    video the cam serie
    video web cam
    video web cam gratis
    video webcam
    video webcam amalia
    video webcam amateur
    video webcam casera gratis
    video webcam casero sms
    video webcam chica
    video webcam chica gratis
    video webcam chica msn
    video webcam com
    video webcam free
    video webcam girl
    video webcam gratis
    video webcam in fraganti
    video webcam msn
    video webcam porno gratis
    video webcam sex
    video webcam sexo gratis
    video webcam x
    video wed cam
    videochat de sexo gratis
    videochat eroticos gratis
    videochat gratis de sexo
    videochat gratis webcam
    videochat sexo
    videochat webcam
    videochat webcam gratis
    videochat xxx sms
    En cuanto a qué morfología de nalgas se considera deseable sí ha variado con la cultura: en algunas épocas se preferían prominentes y en la actualidad se valora que sean visibles, pero a la vez firmes y armoniosas.
    En décadas posteriores, el terrorismo psicológico reemplazó a las otras medidas. Por ejemplo, se decía a los nin~os que si se masturbaban les crecerían pelos en las manos, la cara se le volvería verde, se les secaría el pene o el clítoris, se volverían locos, les saldrían granos en la cara… En los EE.UU y otros países angloparlantes, se comenzó a practicar de forma rutinaria la circuncisión neonatal debido a un supuesto efecto preventivo contra la masturbación y la clitoridectomía a las chicas que eran descubiertas haciéndolo. Esta última se abandonó bien entrada la década de 1930, pero la circuncisión neonatal de los varones se sigue practicando (con poco éxito, dada la gran extensión de la masturbación).
    En el caso de la vagina piensa que ha de permitir el paso de un bebe en el momento del parto, cuyo taman~o es mayor al de un pun~o. Recuerda que al igual que el parto es doloroso esta práctica también puede serlo si no la realizas adecuadamente. Realizado correctamente llega a ser muy placentero y nada traumático.
    En el coito anal o pedicación la mujer obtiene en gran medida su placer al ser estimulado el útero, el cual frecuentemente es poco estimulado en el coito vaginal. El hombre lo obtiene a través de la estimulación de su próstata.
    En el hombre, en concreto, dosis incluso inferiores a las que se establecen como limite legal para determinar si la persona esta o no embriagada (0.08 %) producen efectos de supresión de la erección. Así mismo el alcohol debilita la eficacia masturbatoria y disminuye el goce y la intensidad del orgasmo masculino.
    En Espan~a esta práctica sexual es coloquialmente llamada de muchas maneras: “por el ojete”, “por el desagüe”, “por el jarapel”, “jarapelización”, entre otras.
    En este caso la profundidad de la penetración es mucho menor y existe el riesgo de que el pene del chico que penetra se “escape” en varias ocasiones del recto de su pareja. En cambio, es una postura muy sensitiva y con mucho contacto físico entre los dos compan~eros. Permite además a la persona que penetra jugar con los genitales de su compan~ero.
    En general, el hombre se masturba sujetando con una mano el cuerpo de la verga e imprimiendo un movimiento rítmico de vaivén, al mismo tiempo que acaricia el tallo de arriba a abajo. La mayoría estimula también el glande y el frenillo (bajo el glande, en la parte inferior). Algunos consiguen llegar al orgasmo frotando el glande cada vez más rápido. Para otros, con una sensibilidad extrema, esta maniobra puede ser dolorosa. El nivel de presión, la rapidez y la amplitud del movimiento varian de un individuo a otro.
    En la década de 1980 llegó al público a través de videos. Con la difusión masiva del video, millones de personas en todo el mundo pudieron ver películas porno en la privacidad de sus hogares, sin tener que asistir a un cine porno, lo que resultaba algo embarazoso. Las estrellas pornográficas como Cicciolina o Rocco Siffredi se hicieron populares y ampliamente conocidas. Con el surgimiento de internet, el porno ha alcanzado una expansión aún mucho mayor.Las películas de Jean Yves Le Castel Rocco Siffredi y Cristoph Clark marcan un antes y un después en la historia del cine y del arte en general.
    videochats chica webcam sms
    videos con webcam
    videos de sexo gratis
    videos de sexo porno
    videos de sexo xxx
    videos de webcams
    videos de webcams gratis
    videos porno directo
    videos porno directos
    videos porno en directo
    videos porno gratis directos
    videos webcams
    videos webcams gratis
    vidio captura cam gratis
    view sex webcam chat
    vigile casa webcam
    visa cam
    visio cam sexy
    visto webcam sexo
    vive cam com
    vivo porno
    vivo sexo

Comments are closed.