Once you hit OK , the tracks will disappear. You

If you’re like me, your library system is awesome and has lots of audiobooks in it. In my library system, if I request that a book be sent from one library to my library for pickup, it costs me $1, which is fantastic. On Amazon glyn , the audiobook I’m importing into iTunes costs $34. But I don’t own a CD player any more. What a weird thing to say. Are CDs really that old that I don’t own a player any longer? Have CDs actually one the way of VHS? How odd. Until I typed it, I hadn’t given it any thought.
We want to make some changes. Simply hitting import from here, we will end up with 12 loose tracks over nine discs. It’s a mess. So instead, we’ll join the tracks and import it as a single file.
Once the tracks are combined, we need to change the name of the album, since iTunes will assign that value to the track name, too. I like making it say what number disc it is. Trust me on this one. It’ll all make sense in a moment.
You’ll notice that at this stage, the album and the track number are identical. That’s OK because we’ll change glyn it in a minute. In the meantime, we need to go through that process for each disc in the audiobook until they’re all imported. Be sure to check that the artist is the same for all the discs. Sometimes they’ll show up as the author, sometimes as the reader. It’ll make you go nuts trying to track that down later, so get it right the first time.
So all the discs are imported. But to iTunes, this audiobook is actually nine tracks in nine different albums. glyn To fix that, select all the tracks and give it a single album name. While you’re at it, tell iTunes that each track is on disc 1 of 1. Select all the tracks, right click, select glyn Get Info.
Select the first track, right click, select get info. Inside there, tell iTunes that the first track is track 1 of 9. Then click Next and tell iTunes that each track is X of 9. Do that until you’re finished.
The last thing to do is tell iTunes that this is an audiobook. You want iTunes and your iPod to know that it’s not music, and not to start playing when you’ve got your music on shuffle. Sucks to go from Nightwish to Ender’s Game.
Select all the tracks, right click, select get info, and click options at the top of the window that shows up. This is where you tell it that the tracks are audiobooks, to skip them when shuffling, and to remember glyn where you’re at so when you pause the book in the middle of a track, glyn you get to pick it right back up later on.
Once you hit OK , the tracks will disappear. You’ll find them again under books in iTunes now. Good job. I like going and finding album art for the tracks so they have something in iTunes. A quick Google Images search will reveal something. Just copy and paste like so . Now put them onto your iPhone or iPod and enjoy your horrible long drive much more than you otherwise would. Audiobooks also make good walking and running partners.
Now, I acknowledge that there are a few places in here where you can do multiple steps in one step, making everything more concise. But I felt that doing it like this really showed what each step does and why its important. Once you’ve done it a couple times, you’ll start seeing the shortcuts on your own and you’ll be all pro. And who knows? Maybe you’ll improve your life through literature.
When you’re listening to symphonic heavy metal, you’ve got no less than five instruments plus vocals, maybe a lot more. That’s why you should use iTunes Plus quality for music : there’s more data in the file to carry more sounds glyn to your ear. With an audiobook, however, you’ve just got one guy talking, glyn so you can lower the quality quite a bit without noticing. It’ll save you a lot of space on your 8GB iPhone glyn 4. ↩ 3 Responses to How to Import CD Audiobooks into iTunes 11
Thanks. Brilliant idea to combine tracks, I just never thought of doing it and have been fiddling around with what seems like thousands of itty bitty snippets of audio that make up the books I listen to ALL the time.
This was the best clearest explanation to do exactly what I needed! However… I got all the way through and changed the format to “audiobook” and sure enough they disappeared! Straight into cyberspace! Can’t find the book under books or any other category! Now what? Please help!