Splasm Software Discussions

Great tool, anyway, but …

1. As a victim of the iPod (5th Generation) Audiobook-Alzheimer bug (my iPod gets dementive and forgets the bookmark position or skips eventually in the middle of the .m4b track) i’d like a setting of a max. file size per part (64MiB, says the web, is the critical mass for an iPod).

2. Living in Germany i prefer a naming like “Hörbuch, Teil 1”, french users prefer their own etc.: there should be a preferences setting for this.

3. Also, since german, i prefer the file being categorized in genre “Hörbuch” rather than “Audiobook“. A lot of my smart playlists rely on this. You could provide a setting for this also.

4. Mentioning a tag issue: why couldn’t you let ABB import some more of the tags, including “album artist” or “comments” (i put “Read by TheReader” in the comments tag).

5. Why does ABB not read the cover from the iTunes file?

6. Is it really necessary to create a new project with a fully qualified file name plus save location? Why not wait until the first iTunes file is given, extract the ABB project name from it’s “album” tag, the author from the “artist” tag and set the cover artwork, then finally ask the user to save (suggesting the now appropiate file name)?

Lots of suggestions, which are not really essential for me, but nice to have

Sorry for pushing this up, but…

A lot of trouble, including other’s demands for batch processing an the iTunes tag issue, would be solved if you provide an AppleScript interface.

Like others I’m condensing some 100 MP3 deserts to audiobooks using ABB.
I already wrote an AppleScript for iTunes to copy the carefully set tags to the new M4B.

A scripting interface should provide the ability to create projects, change their settings and fill projects with iTunes’ tracks.

I think of selecting an audiobook’s tracks in iTunes, start a script from the menu, some time later the M4B appears in the track list with all the descriptive tags from the source tracks set alike. Maybe I will be asked wether or not the original tracks shall be deleted …

<edit>Taking a sullen look at the tracklist yet to convert, the above script could detect by tag, if a new album should be audiobooked.
To completely batch the task
</edit>