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PostPosted: Fri Mar 16, 2012 2:40 pm 
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Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 1:53 pm
Posts: 2
Hi everyone,

I was thinking about this for quite a while and was hoping that Apple would allow audiobooks to be uploaded.
This may be the case someday, but until then we'll have to do a workaround.

Earlier this week I found an article on macworld.com, written by Kirk McElhearn adressing this matter:
http://www.macworld.com/article/1164237 ... match.html

Happy that someone found a solution I tried to upload files follwing this tutorial.
Since I use Audiobook Builder to create my audiobooks for iTunes, I skipped the mp3 part and went for the ABB conversion part.
Here's the short version:
  • Create an audiobook in ABB
  • Set output quality to min 96kbps with mono & 44.1khz
  • Format: M4A (AAC Music)
  • If you want to preserve chapters (sort of) set the part style to chapters (that'll create one audio file for each chapter)
Did that and tried to start iTunes Match for getting the files uploaded to the cloud.
Unfortunately I got the error that the files were ineligible for uploading.
iTunes spent several minutes on scanning the files, though.
So I started over, played around with the settings (128kbps, stereo, etc).
None of this worked.
I had a discussion with @splasmsoftware via twitter, and it appears that iTunes runs into an error if any chapter information is written into the audio file.
This is why ABB created M4A files can't be uploaded to iTunes Match. You can't even convert them within iTunes, same error.

To the real part:
If you want your audiobooks to be uploaded you need to change the workflow a bit.
Instead of creating a M4A out of ABB, you'll create M4B files, just like a normal audiobook.
For uploading reasons (iTunes Match won't upload files larger than 200MB) you should split your audiobook file by chapters (as described before).
  • create a new project
  • enter all desired information and add a cover
  • adjust settings in ABB in build options
  • start conversion
  • once ABB has finished, you should have one M4B file per chapter.
  • add those into iTunes and they'll appear in the audiobook section of iTunes.
  • browse to the new book and select all files/chapters.
  • right click on the selected files and choose 'create AAC' from the context menu
    (or your desired format, see help here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1550)
  • iTunes will create the files and add them to the music library
  • you can now delete the original M4B files from your audiobook library
  • start iTunes Match and watch them files getting uploaded :)

A good thing doing it this way is that you don't need to alter settings like 'remember Position' or 'skip when shuffling', iTunes keeps those settings from the files audiobook origin.

What about your existing audiobooks?
A good thing about ABB is that it will read the chapter information of an M4B and automatically set the chapters with chapter information.
If you want to convert your exsisting books, just create a new project in ABB, drag the track from iTunes to ABB and create the chapter-split-M4Bs.

With that done - you're one step closer to PC free. :mrgreen:

All credits go to Kirk (https://twitter.com/#!/mcelhearn/), I just tweaked a bit.

_________________
Feel free to contact me on twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/andi242)


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