After having owned and ipod (classic, 80 gig, 5th gen) for 2+ years and listened to innumerable adverts for Audible.com on "This Week in Tech" I had decided that it was time to try out and audiobook and see if the experience was any good. However, the audiobook I had with me was a simple MP3 format and I never figured out how to convert it into an audiobook till recently.
Before I jump into a step-by-step tutorial why is an 'audiobook' better than a simple 'mp3'-
- The audiobook files appear under a separate menu section in your ipod instead of amongst the gazillions songs in your music library.
- Once marked as Audiobook the ipod remembers where you stopped listening to and replays from there the next time.
- And for those who find the pace of the audiobook much, much slower than their reading speed- one can speed up or slow down the audiobook file. They do it in such a way that the reader doesn't seem to have ODed on helium or transmogrified into chipmunks*. On the speed note- I've also heard that there exists some research that listening to this faster version results in higher comprehension, but as I haven't had a look at that report myself I'm not sure if they did any correlation analysis with audiobook-listening-while-driving concentration.**
So, how we do that?
- Add the MP3 to your iTunes library
- Right-click on the selected track/tracks and select "Get Info" from the menu
- Choose the "Options" tab and set the "Media Kind" to "Audiobook" and also enable "Remember playback position" and "Skip when shuffling".
* It keeps the audio at the same pitch. It does sound slightly weird though, at least on my ipod and I couldn't get used to it especially for dramatic reading of fiction.
** Note no hyperlink- which means I heard of the study from someone over lunch and couldn't google it successfully.
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