MP3 players: Best, current MP3 player for audio books......

How to best rip CD audio books to an iPod

I have been following this thread for a couple of YEARS! I bought an iPod but had great difficulty at first putting a CD audio book into iTunes and then onto my iPod in such a fashion that the books were easy to find, listen to, and return to where I had been. Here is the results of a long effort. You need to have iTunes on your computer for this. I have a Mac, but iTunes works with Windows too. I believe these instructions should be accurate for Windows.

Put the first disc into the CD drive. iTunes should query you asking if you want to put the list of tracks into iTunes. Click NO. First select all the tracks. iTunes should get information about this book from the internet database and it will display the:

Name, Artist, Genre, Album by Year

You need to make sure the Artist is the author of the book, the genre is Books & Spoken, the Album by year is the name of the book. The first field is the Name of the "song" Call all the songs "Disc 1" because when you are finished editing the information, you will rip the disc as only 1 track and that track will have the name "Disc 1" (or whatever you decide to call it.)

To edit the information, make sure all the tracks are selected (click on the top one and the shift click on the bottom) and then RIGHT click on the bunch. Select "Get Info" from the popup window. In the resulting window put the author as Artist, name of book as Album, Genre is Books & Spoken. I put "read by ...." in the Composer window, but it doesn't matter. Leave the other fields blank. Click OK to save and escape.

Back in iTunes with all the tracks selected, click "Advanced" in the iTunes menu at the top of the window and select "Join CD Tracks" then at the bottom right of the window click on "Import CD"

Follow these steps for all the discs and at the end you will have as many tracks as there are discs. If you have made any textual mistakes you can edit individual tracks now with the right click Get Info. But before you quit, select all the new tracks and Get Info again. In the info window at the bottom check YES for Compilation, remember position, and skip when shuffling. Making it a compilation will keep all the tracks under the same cover, remember position will pick up where you quit last (you DO have to remember which disc you were on) and skip when shuffling will mean you won't hear one of the book segments when you are listening to a music shuffle.

Next go through each track and in the Get Info form, change the number of Discs to be 1 of 1 and make the tracks be first 1 of x (number of original discs) This will insure the tracks are indeed in the correct order no matter what you call the Name of the track.

When you sync your iPod next the book will be found under Music>Genre>Books & Spoken.

As a final added touch, I go to Amazon and search for the book. This gives me a graphic of the book cover. Right clicking on it allows me to save the image to my desktop. From there I drag the picture to the Get Info window of the entire book, and there I drop it into "Artwork" The cover will then appear next to the book and in cover flow. Not necessary, but it's very nice.

Good luck.