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Ramblings on audiobooks

In one of my previous posts I have noted I’m an avid audiobook consumer. I started when I was at the hospital, because I didn’t have the energy to read — and most likely, because of the blood sugar being out of control after coming back from the ICU: it turns out that blood sugar changes can make your eyesight go crazy; at some point I had to buy a pair of €20 glasses simply because my doctor prescribed me a new treatment and my eyesight ricocheted out of control for a week or so.

Nowadays, I have trouble sleeping if I’m not listening to something, and I end up with the Audible app installed in all my phones and tablets, with at least a few books preloaded whenever I travel. Of course as I said, I keep the majority of my audiobooks in the iPod, and the reason is that while most of my library is on Audible, not all of it is. There are a few books that I have bought on iTunes before finding out about Audible, and then there are a few I received in CD form, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Complete Radio Series which is my among my favourite playlists.

Unfortunately, to be able to convert these from CD to a format that the iPod could digest, I ended up having to buy a software called Audiobook Builder for Mac, which allows you to rip CDs and build M4B files out of them. What’s M4B? It’s the usual mp4 format container, just with an extension that makes iTunes consider it an audiobook, and with chapter markings in the stream. At the time I first ripped my audiobooks, ffmpeg/libav had no support for chapter markings, so that was not an option. I’ve been told that said support is there now, but I have not tried getting it to work.

Indeed, what I need to find out is how to build an audiobook file out of a string of mp3 files, and I have no idea how to fix that now that I no longer have access to my personal iTunes account on a mac to re-download the Audiobook Builder and process them. In particular, the list of mp3s that I’m looking forward to merge together are the years 2013 and 2014 of BBC’s The News Quiz, to which I’m addicted and listen continuously. Being able to join them all together so I can listen to them with a multi-day-running playlist is one of the very few things that still let me sleep relatively calmly — I say relatively because I really don’t remember when was the last time I have slept soundly in about an year by now.

Essentially, what I’d like is for Audible to let me sideload some content (the few books I did not buy from them, and the News Quiz series that I stitch together from the podcast), and create a playlist — then for what I’m concerned I don’t have to use an iPod at all. Well, beside the fact that I’d have to find a way to shut up notifications while playing audiobooks. Having Dragons of Autumn Twilight interrupted by the Facebook pop notification is not something that I’m looking forward for most of the time. And in some cases I even have had some background update disrupting my playback so there is definitely space for improvement.

Comments 3
  1. See that scares me a little bit. Why on earth would you need faac, sox and mp4v2 when libav has most if not all the things you need? Especially faac… that encoder is terrible.

  2. If you want to use another device like a tablet or phone to listen to your audiobooks without interruption, put the device in airplane mode. It can’t get any Facebook notifications if it’s not connected to Facebook. For iOS, Do Not Disturb mode could also do the job. I don’t know if Android has an equivalent to that, but it seems likely that someone would sell that as an app if not.

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