Build Your Own Audiobooks

In iTunes and on iPods, "audiobook" is not just another genre, but a distinct type of audio file with a few useful extra features. Creating your own files of this type is possible, and there are numerous tutorials on how to do this. But this is a non-trivial and tedious task -- unless you delegate all the heavy lifting to Audiobook Builder.

Audiobook Builder focuses on performing a single task, which is turning audio files or CDs into proper audiobooks, so you can enjoy all the benefits of that file type: unlike normal audio files, audiobooks have their own iTunes Library category, combine multiple tracks into a single file, support chapter bookmarks for navigation, allow different playback speeds, remember their playback position, and are skipped when shuffle play is activated.

Creating an audiobook with Audiobook Builder is a simple three-step process:

1. Create a project
2. Add audio content
3. Build audiobook

Step 1: Creating an audiobook project

Similar to other media editing software like iMovie or GarageBand, Audiobook Builder uses projects, one per audiobook. To be more precise, each project contains all the imported audio files for an audiobook plus accompanying meta-data like title and chapter structure.

When you launch Audiobook Builder, you're greeted by a panel, also similar to those in iMovie or GarageBand, from which to create a new project, open an existing one, or bring up the application's help. The help pages that ship with Audiobook Builder are outstanding, by the way: complete, well-structured, well-written, and -- unlike way too many help files these days -- included right inside the application (so you don't need to be connected to the Internet to access them).

Click on "Create a New Project," and a standard save dialog appears, including pop-up menus to select the project's audio quality -- High, Normal, Low, or Custom -- and the output file's type -- with or without chapter bookmarks.

Once the project file has been saved to disk, Audiobook Builder presents its main window, which is devided into three panes: Cover, Chapters, and Finish. Giving your newly created project a title, author and cover art in the Cover pane rounds off creating a new project, and adding the actual audio content comes next.

Step 2: Adding content to the project

There are three funnels through which you can pour content into an audiobook project: importing stand-alone audio files, importing a selection from your iTunes library, or ripping an audio CD.

All three modes work flawlessly, and especially the import from iTunes is very intuitive: select the files in the iTunes application, click the "Add iTunes" button in Audiobook Builder, and you're done.

When you choose to import tracks directly from a CD, Audiobook Builder will grab the CDs title and track names from the Gracenote database. Unfortunately, I ran into an annoying limitation when I ripped a two-CD audiobook for my example project: Audiobook Builder will always rip the whole CD, i.e., you cannot select just a few specific tracks for importing. I'll explain a bit later, why I don't like this.

Any media files you add to a project are shown in a hierarchical list, with chapters behaving like folders and containing the audio files for that chapter. When you're listening to the audiobook in iTunes or on your iPod, it's these chapters that will show up in Chapters menu and in the track's timeline, respectively.

Organizing chapters and files is straight-forward: either drag-and-drop chapters and/or files with the mouse, or use the toolbar's Join and Split buttons. Apply the Join command on a selection of chapters and files, and all files will be combined into one chapter; using Split on a selection of chapters will create a chapter "folder" for each of the selected files, and sort the files into the corresponding chapters.

Finally, you can rename chapters and add a different cover art image for each one, and there's a pre-listen function available for each chapter, too.

Before I continue explaining how Audiobook Builder is used, this is a good time to quickly point out the only serious flaw I found in it: its lack of full Undo. There is basic undo for text fields, i.e., the kind that Cocoa programmers "get for free" when using standard Aqua widgets: if you change the title or author in the Cover pane, or the chapter name in the Chapter pane's Details area, you can properly undo that change via the Edit menu. For any bigger changes like re-ordering files and chapters, removing audio files from the project, etc. you're out of luck.

It's because of this lack of thorough Undo that I complained earlier that Audiobook Builder will always import a whole CD: while working on this article, I managed to inadvertantly delete some files from the project and had to re-import the whole CD to "undo" my mistake, instead of just re-importing those two or three tracks that needed by added back to the project.

But let's put this criticism into perspective: while the lack of a thorough undo implementation can be annoying at times, it hardly takes anything away from the overall intuitiveness and efficiency of Audiobook Builder as a whole.

Step 3: Building the audiobook

So you're done compiling and organizing the audio contents for your audiobook. What remains to be done? Clicking a single button. Well, two actually, because, first, you have to move to the "Finish" pane, before you can trigger the build process.

The "Finish" pane displays a concise overview over the audiobook's properties, plus the "Build Audiobook" button. Click the button, and Audiobook Builder will start knitting away at the output file and, depending on the preferences settings, dump the finished file into a folder you have chosen, or add it to your iTunes library. When choosing the latter, the newly created title will show up under Audiobooks, where it belongs, and also in a handy Audiobook Builder playlist.

Since Audiobook Builder maintains a project file for each audiobook, you can always make changes later by re-opening a project, applying any changes, and building a fresh audiobook file. Keep in mind, though, that these project files contain the complete raw audio used in the audiobook, so they can become pretty big (biggest one I ended up with is 154MB). Hence, if your Mac is running low on hard drive space, don't hesitate to throw away the project file if you're happy with the audiobook file that was created from it. Also, you can always change an audiobook's global properties like Name (Title), Artist, and Album within iTunes via the 'book's info panel.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye!

Before I discovered Audiobook Builder -- which, admittedly, has been around for a while --, I had imported a few audiobooks as standard audio tracks -- one track for each book chapter -- and manually changed the file type to make them appear in the Audiobooks category. Unfortunately, on an iPod, that category is not ordered hierarchically by "album," so my Audiobooks folder looked like a total mess. Being able to squeeze all those individual tracks into a single, proper audiobook file with all the useful extra features, makes handling audiobooks much more enjoyable.

Thanks to Audiobook Builder's well-thought-out interface, creating those audiobook files from raw sources is painless, and if you like listening to audiobooks and you prefer purchasing them on CD, Audiobook Builder should be high up on your software wish list.

Audiobook Builder is made by Splasm, costs $9.95, and a trial-version is available for download from the product website.