Why is an Audible book playing in Shuffle mode with music?

Question

I bought an audio book on CD. I imported it to iTunes with the expectation that it would be in an audio book folder. It's not, all the segments are in my library and when I listen to my iPod in Shuffle mode it plays sections of the book with the music. How do I get these sections not to be part of the shuffle?
Dave

Answer 1

"Genre" means nothing, really. It's just user settable data.
iTunes considers any files with the extension of M4B or AA to be "Audiobooks" and acts accordingly.
If you bought a book on CD, then you have a few options to make it work the way you're expecting.
1. Import the CD as per normal, and make sure you import it into the AAC format. You can do this by selecting AAC in the Importing preferences. Once you've done that, rename all the resulting M4A files it creates to M4B files, and then remove and readd the files to the iTunes Library. When it sees the M4B extension, it will treat it as an audiobook.
2. What you probably really want to do is to probably combine all those CD's into one big audiobook file. This is the way downloadable audiobooks work, and you get several advantages. One big file, smaller filesize, it remembers your place in the book, etc. How you do this varies, but here's how I do it:
- First, I rip all the CD's as one big WAV file each. I do this with a program called ExactAudioCopy, or EAC. Naturally, this takes tons of disc space (estimate 800 meg per disc).
- Second, I combine all those WAV files into one huge WAV file. This takes lots of space as well, and must also be done on an NTFS formatted hard drive. I use a progam called "WAVCat" to do this, but there's lots of programs that can do it.
- Third, I set iTunes Importing options to encode into AAC at a low bitrate, like 48 or 64kbps. Then I put the huge WAV file in iTunes and use the Convert to AAC option. This process takes many, many hours to finish.
- Finally, I rename the resulting file to have an M4B extension and add it to iTunes. I also delete all the temporary WAV files I created, getting all my hard drive space back.
Bit of an involved process, but the results are worth it, IMO. One audiobook file, at a low bitrate, and both iTunes and the iPod remember my playback location in it. Also it gets treated as a proper audiobook, showing up as an audiobook on the iPod and everything else.