5G iPod Problems with Audiobooks, revisited
By tunequest March 14, 2008
Lately I’ve been on a tear with audiobooks, managing to cram a number of books in between my regular music and podcast listening. The sudden upswing in interest has prompted me to renew my investigation of the problems the 5G (fifth generation) model iPod has with long-playing books. As I noted last summer, the 5G has troubles with homemade m4b files (bookmarkable AAC) longer than a certain play time.
The iPod will suddenly stop playing an audiobook within a few minutes and return to the main menu. This happens when resuming a book, after having listened to something else or resyncing the device, basically anything that stops rather than pauses the book. When selecting the book again, the iPod starts from the beginning, having lost the bookmark and updating the play count/date as though it had properly finished playing.
Since I knew I would be delving into book territory, I decided to figure out the optimum way of working around the iPod’s inexplicable limitation. And really, for all my experimentation, the only concrete result I’ve been able to find is: 4 hours. 4 hours is about the maximum running time of any homemade m4b audiobook file before the iPod starts wigging out about it. It didn’t matter what I used for my encoding settings, my sample rates, or bit rates or channels or workflow or program. No combination of settings allowed the iPod to play longer than 4 hours without a hiccup, always stopping in the middle of the same phrase.
I even tried this little ingenious trick:
I manually set the audiobook’s options in iTunes so that the start time was at the 4 hour mark, hoping to persuade my iPod to at least go for another 4 hours. No dice.
I can say however that the sample rate seems to have the most effect on how long you can listen before the iPod won’t let you pick up where you left off. 22 kHz seems to be the trick. Whether your book is stereo or mono seems to matter little, giving about the same performance. Same for bitrate. However, higher sampling rates seems to reduce the amount of time before you lose the bookmark feature.
There probably are a handful more combinations and techniques I could try, but it takes quite a while to join, encode, test and evaluate each option. If anyone finds something with significantly different results, feel free to drop a line this way.
In the meantime, I’m glad Audiobook Builder can set a Maximum Part length and will split files so that nothing is longer than what I need them to be. It’s a groovy little workaround.
Ive had the same problem and its really getting on my nerves. Maybe suggesting a fix for this to Apple might help
O, and is that audiobook builder just for macs?
Unfortunately for Windows users, the two straight-forward methods I know for creating audiobooks are Mac only: the Audiobook Builder program and an Applescript called Join Together.
The process certainly is doable on Windows however. You have to splice your audio together, convert it to AAC/M4A and then just change to file extension to M4B before copying it to your iPod. But I don’t know of any Windows solutions that will do all that with “one click.”
There’s a nice little free windows program (MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter ) that creates m4bs, joins mp3s, etc. in one click: http://www.freeipodsoftware.com/
I’m also having this problem with my 5.5G ipod. If anyone comes up with a solution, please post. Thanks!
I experienced this problem (rarely), but only with Audible files on my 5.5G iPod
With the new 160GB Classic I haven’t seen the problem at all. In fact I’ve been converting my 2 part books into 1 part books. It’s nice to not have as many files floating around.