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Itunes / Ipod / Book (M4B) - Tagging - Expert Needed

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  • eckre
    • Oct 2005
    • 15

    Itunes / Ipod / Book (M4B) - Tagging - Expert Needed

    I need a ipod audio book expert to make me understand how this all works. I'm a techy and read hundreds of hours a year, audio book style, and whenever I ask my ipod friends how to do this stuff, they just shug.

    From time to time I try and figure out how the hell ipod's naming and sorting system works for books. Will someone just tell me how to do this with db. I consider myself an audio book making expert, as I've been making audio books since the mp3 codec came out in 97. But I married an Mac, and she has an ipod. Anyways, here is how it works:

    I have almost 2 thousand books in this format:
    <number> - <artist> - <album> - <title>

    I also populate correctly the ID3 tags. Because then it plays correctly in every mp3 player in the world.. in theory. Most mp3 players play things alphabetically, and since I zero pad the number, 01, 02, 03 all works well for books with less than 100 tracks when I'm in that folder.

    I do populate the "audiobook" genre tag as well as some mp3 makers use this, like Sandisk for sorting out music from audiobooks in case you don't put them in the right folder.

    Well good for Apple you got your own audio book format, the m4b, love it. So I convert a book from mp3 into m4b, all the id3 tags are all populated correctly, zero padded, and I put it on the ipod, go to "Audiobooks".... It's... not there. WTF?

    Go to Music, and sure, they are all there... sorted alphabetically by TITLE??? AYFKM Apple? It's in your own damn audio book format, everything is populated correctly, and you're going to play my book by alphabetically by track title? And it mixed it in with everything else. How I get to it is, I go to albums and then I can sometimes play it there. Sometimes it shows up on the ipod, othertimes not.

    (deep breath)

    What am I doing wrong? I am being stupid, will someone just tell me what's going on and how I SHOULD be doing it.

    When I try to convert a book to ipod, In db I see:

    Force LC AAC
    No Profile
    Force HE AAC
    Force HE v2

    with the checkbox "Create RTP Hint"

    All my books are typically 64/44/mono. Typically they are separated by chapter or whatever, so there can be hundred of tracks. (If I conjoin the files to 1 file, what sucks is when I accidentally press next, I have to spend 40 minutes holding down fastforward to get to where I used to be.) Someone tell me exactly what settings I should use, anything I should do specifically to the tags to make this place nice like it should with the ipod.
  • Spoon
    Administrator
    • Apr 2002
    • 43926

    #2
    Re: Itunes / Ipod / Book (M4B) - Tagging - Expert Needed

    There must be something else which Apple are looking for to say it is an audio book, first step would be to compare the ID tags to the tags of an audio book it does recognise.
    Spoon
    www.dbpoweramp.com

    Comment

    • eckre
      • Oct 2005
      • 15

      #3
      Re: Itunes / Ipod / Book (M4B) - Tagging - Expert Needed

      Hello? Anyone?

      I refuse to believe that ALL apple people are really just clueless sheep.

      Maybe I'm wrong.

      I took an .wav and made 13 different versions of it using all kinds of db options, mp3 m4b in every profile, CBR, VBR, etc. and no difference.

      Comment

      • garym
        dBpoweramp Guru
        • Nov 2007
        • 5744

        #4
        Re: Itunes / Ipod / Book (M4B) - Tagging - Expert Needed

        Originally posted by eckre
        Hello? Anyone?

        I refuse to believe that ALL apple people are really just clueless sheep.

        Maybe I'm wrong.

        I took an .wav and made 13 different versions of it using all kinds of db options, mp3 m4b in every profile, CBR, VBR, etc. and no difference.
        you haven't responded to Spoon's earlier suggestion. Find a file that works as expected in itunes. So you know it must have the right tags. Then look at the tags in that file as compared with tags in a file you create in dbpa. Not sure how to look at ALL tags/fields in a file with dbpa. But in mp3tag (which does more than mp3), you load files, right click on file, select "extended tags" and you'll see every single field in the metadata.

        Comment

        • eckre
          • Oct 2005
          • 15

          #5
          Re: Itunes / Ipod / Book (M4B) - Tagging - Expert Needed

          Well, I better explain the end of the story, if anyone is ever searching.

          I found some advanced id3 tags with Mp3Tag checked them out, (more advanced than just the "genre" tag):



          Check that out, hell yeah:

          "Itunesmediatype"
          "mediatype"

          These are OBVIOUSLY Apple's proprietary id3 tags for audio files. And guess what? Apple doesn't use them. I was going to tag ALL of the 85,000 book files with ""Itunesmediatype=Audiobook" and/or "mediatype=Audiobook so they will show up in apple's audiobook section when you drag them over with itunes, but it does not work!!!

          So I did it apple style: I took an mp3 and tagged it with itunes method of right click on the file > "Get Info" > Options Tab > pull down from the menu of "Media Kind" > select Audiobook > OK, then it shows up in the correct audiobook section of itunes/ipod.



          So what did itunes do? I couldn't tell any difference in size of the file, or the basic of advanced tags, it renamed it, so I pulled out the handy HEX editor and compared the two files:



          Holy F&** hell! Both were identical. So when you tag something in iTunes as audiobook, it does not modify the file (like it should) it just remembers in the itunes settings, move the file over to a new computer, upgrade your computer, change computers, you're screwed, do it all over again.

          This is the biggest worthless POS system on the planet. It reminds me of some POS Chinese mp3 player that's using some GAWD awful proprietary system that doesn't make sense and some guy just threw it together in a couple of minutes who didn't think things through.

          Literally hundred of thousands of complaints are all around the internet about this. Seriously Steve Jobs? We read books by page number 1 > 2 > 3, we don't look at the top letter of each page, and read all the A pages first, then all the B pages next... Such an easy fix.

          Yeah, you could convert them to m4b, but why the hell would I lock all my files into an asinine proprietary system? Apple people are obviously suffering from Stockholm Syndrome; google it, after a while they start to love their captors.

          /rant.

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