Hi Nic, You asked about Audiobook Builder, and described your fears about its limitations:
"I have bought and used a similar app called AudioBookBinder. It seemed to work really well. However, I discovered, sadly only after converting most of my audiobooks, that it seems to have some limitations. It doesn't seem to be able to create files longer than 14 hours. Many books I have bound into one file have stopped around the 14 hour mark, despite the fact that the book was actually much longer. Moreover, I haven't seemed to be able to get the chapter navigation to work, despite the app stating that it did this automatically. So I'm a little reluctant to try one of these apps again, in case I get similar results." I can explain why you may have hit a limit of about 14 hours in the playback of your books as a single file, but the actual limit depends on the specs you used to rip your tracks. Oddly enough, there's a list post from two years ago that I wrote to another Nic on this subject. He had some very long recordings that he could play in their entirety if he used QuickLook to stream them (e.g., select the track in Finder and press space bar to start it playing), but which cut off before the end when he tried to play them in a music player. Most digital music players, including QuickTime Player -- the actual software that plays back your tracks interactively with controls -- cannot generally handle tracks with more than 2 billion samples. There's a digital counter in the header encoding along with the tag information of your MP3 or AAC that turns over when you reach the maximum number that can be represented by a 32-bit unsigned integer, which is slightly more than 2 billion. If you rip a track at CD quality sampling, or 44.1 kHz, then for constant bit rate sampling, the time in seconds it takes to reach that maximum number is 2 billion divided by 44.1 thousand per sec. That works out to about 13.5 hours for a stereo track, and about 27 hours for a mono track. If you simply stream play your track, with no efforts to adjust the playback position, rewind, fast forward, or use bookmarks, then in principle you can play tracks that exceed this size (at least on a computer). In order to navigate to bookmarks, your music player on an iPhone, or iPod needs to be able to tell where in the track you want to go to. If the counter has "turned over" you won't be able to find the location. Somewhat like trying to set an alarm for "13 o'clock". If you're ripping from CDs, you can change your importing settings by either customizing the sampling rate or, in the AAC format, selecting one for "Spoken Podcast" which uses voice optimization but samples at 22.05 kHz. Audiobook Builder will let you choose the sampling rate (and may give you a warning if your size goes over). Here's an excerpt from their FAQ: "Why does Audiobook Builder limit part length? The iPod and iPhone can handle files that contain approximately 2 billion audio samples or less. This translates into roughly 27 hours for Audiobook Builder's Low Quality preset (22.05 kHz), 18 hours for its Normal Quality preset (32 kHz) and 13 hours for its High Quality preset (44.1 kHz). The lower the audio sample rate the longer your parts can be. It's possible to reach a maximum part length of 74 hours by selecting the Custom... Quality option and choosing an 8 kHz sample rate. Files that exceed the 2 billion sample limit will not play properly on the iPod or iPhone." Actually, I don't use Audiobook Builder that much now, but yes, it works well with VoiceOver. I used to do this all by hand, and import audiobooks from CDs as joined tracks, for 1 track per CD. There are other reasons for not pushing the maximum length limit if you used early iPods or iPod Shuffles, because bookmarking wasn't always reliable if you exceeded the local cache memory of the device. But it's true that most of the impetus for figuring out how iTunes works came from wanting to play my audiobooks. Now I get most of them from Audible. The default settings for importing from CD may set a 13 hour maximum for a single file depending on the preset you use. You can also join existing tracks you've already imported into iTunes. If you want to check out the trial download, you can get it from the downloads page of Splasm's web site: http://www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder/downloads.html It looks as though currently a single user license is $4.95 through their web site store, and $5.95 from the Mac App Store. As for your existing joined tracks using AudioBookBinder, you may be able to recover access to the rest of the books if you split the tracks. HTH. Cheers, Esther -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
