Easy to use and makes chapter ….

I am in fact using both cdparanoia and sox out of Macports.

1. Use cdparanoia to rip each CD as a single WAV file (cdparanoia 1-4, for ex)
2. Combine the wav files using sox -s cd*.wav book.wav
3. Encode using the nero aac encoder on Linux or Windows.

My neroaacenc command of choice is:

neroaacenc -q 0.3 -cbr 32000 -if foo.wav -of foo.m4a

4. Import into itunes on the mac, use the applescript to convert it to m4b.

Definitely a bit more work, but it doesn’t involve two steps of lossy compression, so better overall quality.

I checked out the programs mentioned here as well as a couple others I stumbled across via googling the topic. Each falls into one of three categories: made for Windows only, made for Leopard+ only, and paid. (I’m still on Tiger because the audio program I use most at work doesn’t have a really stable Leopard version out yet.) If I were cranking out a new book every week, I’d pay for a more feature-rich program, but for 3 or 4 a year? Nah. Join Together should work fine for me. Very happy to know about it.