The method uses a script from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes, an extremely useful site with a plethora of scripts for Apple’s media application. The particular script I’ll be using is called JoinTogether and uses QuickTime to stitch the files together into larger one.

Step One

Once you’ve downloaded JoinTogether, open the application, and open iTunes. By holding down Command (⌘) and clicking, select all the tracks in iTunes that you want to combine, then switch to JoinTogether and click the button at the bottom of the window labelled ‘Get Tracks From iTunes’. This grabs all the tracks you have selected in iTunes and adds them to the list in JoinTogether.

Step Two

Now drag and drop the tracks so that they’re in the correct order. Unfortunately, you can’t drag more than one item at a time, so this can be a little time-consuming. However, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. You can also double-click to change the names of the tracks, so that they correspond to the chapter names later.

Step Three

Add all the appropriate tags and information for the audiobook. There isn’t really any need to fill in Album, Composer or Grouping, as audiobooks don’t have this information. I use the Artist field for the author of the book. To make sure that your file behaves as an audiobook once it’s in iTunes, tick ‘Remember playback position’ so iTunes keeps your place between listening sessions. I’d also suggest ticking ‘Skip when shuffling’, otherwise your audiobook can be played in Shuffle on your iPod or iPhone.

Step Four

Now it’s time to customize the settings for the book. To make sure that iTunes handles it as an audiobook and not a regular music file, change the option on the right from .m4a to .m4b – this means that the book is placed under ‘Books’ in your iTunes library, and not ‘Music’, because .m4b is the extension of an audiobook file. Under QuickTime Settings are some options which control the quality of the finished book. My personal preference is to keep the data rate at least over 128 kbps, but it’s up to you. A higher rate equals better quality, but a larger file size. The choice between Stereo and Mono for the Channels setting is purely up to preference or need.

You can use JoinTogether to create chapter markers in the audiobook by checking the ‘Chapterize’ box. However, this creates a chapter for every track you have added from iTunes, which may not be where the chapters are in the book. The Harry Potter book I’m using for my example here has each chapter split into three or four files, for instance. If you have only one track for each chapter, then I suggest using the ‘Chapterize’ option.

Step Five

All that’s left to do now is hit the Proceed button. If you see a red exclamation mark to the left of the proceed button, then that means that the total track length of your audiobook will be greater than 12 hours. This can be problematic because QuickTime has a maximum file length of around 13.5 hours. If this is the case, it’s best to split your audiobook into two or more parts so that QuickTime doesn’t run into any issues with length. While this isn’t ideal, it’s better than still having a dozen “01.mp3″ files floating around in iTunes.

Once you click proceed, QuickTime will make a mess of your desktop by opening every track from JoinTogether separately, and will then proceed to join them together into one big file. As a rough guide, QuickTime took about 10 minutes to create a four and a half hour book, including stitching together and exporting the final result. Once it’s done, the book is automatically added to iTunes.

There are a couple of ways to get around the chapterizing issue. The first is to join together the files for each chapter, and then join those files together into one audiobook. To explain it more clearly:

• I have a three chapter book, with the chapters split into three files each.
• I’d use JoinTogether to join the three parts of each chapter together into one file per chapter, naming the files Chapter 1, etc.
• I’d then use JoinTogether again to join those files together into the finished book, checking the ‘Chapterize’ box.
• The chapter marks would then be at the correct places in the book, rather than at random places where the files were split.

The other way is to upgrade JoinTogether through the application menu. This costs $7 and includes the feature of joining multiple tracks together in the JoinTogether window to form chapters. It also contains other features such as additional preferences and the ability to sync the audiobook straight onto an iPod or iPhone.

While this is a helpful feature set, I personally get along fine with the regular features, and having to use the chpaterizing workaround doesn’t bother me, because I don’t have very many audiobooks. However, someone with a lot of books may decide that the time saved by upgrading is well worth $7 and pay to upgrade. Whatever floats your boat, as they say.

Syncing in general has been improved in the sense that users can now drill down and sync more specific content. Music can now be synced by a combination of playlists, specific artists or genres. Podcasts can be synced by specific episodes and TV shows can be synced by specific episodes or seasons.

New altogether is the ability to sync iTunes U content which also has its own category, instead of being mixed in randomly between podcasts and music. Photo syncing has also been greatly enhanced, allowing support for specific albums, events or faces. Searching has also been enabled in many of these areas to allow you to quickly narrow down your choices. While these are all great features, they have really intensified the syncing interface. Hopefully it’s not too much for some users.

Still No Love for Audiobooks?

As mentioned in my wish list, I was really hoping for an improved way to sync audiobooks. Apple answered my hopes in an odd way. In the Music section, you can now search through your artists and, upon searching for a particular author, I was able to sync up those specific audiobooks. This isn’t a perfect solution though as a user may have multiple audiobooks from the same author. Why not just add another tab across the top? Apple added one for iTunes U. (I’m completely kidding. Remember, the interface is getting too complicated. iTunes 8 had eight tabs for syncing options while iTunes 9 brings the number to 10.) I personally feel the number of tabs across the top is too many, but I do feel audiobooks are important enough to warrant a more selective approach for syncing instead of just creating playlists for them.

Home Screens, Sweet Home Screens

Of course, the part most of you will really care about is the ability to organize your iPhone and iPod touch home screens via iTunes. This is simply amazing and is surprisingly quite functional. You simply navigate amongst the home screens, deleting or adding as needed and dragging applications between them. If you want to drag an item from the first screen to the fifth, just click and drag the app and hover over the fifth screen. It’ll pop up in the main view and you can place your app.

You can also select multiple apps by holding down the Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) keys. Moving complete screens around is also a snap, just by clicking and dragging them. All in all, this feature works quite well and should give users no excuse for messy randomly placed apps on their iPhones (or at least quell frustrations of people who attempt to switch between pages while editing apps only to grab and app and move it instead).

Generally speaking, these new syncing options do give users more flexible options to manage content on their devices, but I’m curious to see if any of you feel the interface itself has become a little overblown?

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With Apple’s music oriented media event right around the corner, everyone is abuzz with thoughts about new iPods, Apple TV updates, tablet rumors and more. The one thing we can all but guarantee besides new iPods is an update to iTunes. But what will this version bring? Social aspects have been rumored, but there is still room for improvement. So, here’s my Top 10 wish list for iTunes 9.

1. More Stable & Efficient On Windows

This particular point doesn’t apply to me, as I am a Mac user, but I do know that the Windows version of iTunes has suffered in comparison to its Mac brethren. Though some of the programming technologies in the Windows world are not as robust as their Mac equivalents, I do hope Apple will continue to optimize iTunes as it adds new features. Currently, it’s just a resource hog.

2. Better Audiobook Support

iTunes is a great application to manage your audiobooks and Apple’s partnership with Audible makes it even easier to buy them. What really strikes me as problematic though is how cumbersome it is to sync specific audiobooks to your iPod or iPhone. At the moment, it’s either “all” or “none.” When you consider that some audiobooks have multiple files and some users have insanely huge collections of audiobooks, it really seems like an issue Apple would have refined already. Due to their length, most users listen to one or two audiobooks at a time and don’t need to bring their entire collection with them. The only solution to this dilemma is creating playlists for specific audiobooks and that’s more time consuming than it should be.

3. Better File Organization for Large Libraries

As our libraries of media content grow and grow, Apple is focused on being center stage in helping us organize it all. iTunes is a powerful application and supports a wide gamut of different file types (music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, podcasts, etc.). It would be ideal for Apple to allow users to manage those specific areas on different hard drives since some of us have iTunes libraries that are growing too fast to store on just one drive. We can work around this at the moment by turning off the “Keep iTunes organized” feature when adding new content, but a more elegant solution would be welcome.

4. Ability to Import Unencrypted DVD & Blu-ray Content

We all know there are licensing issues to work out, but since Apple feels its the company’s lot in life to manage all of my digital content, why not figure out a way to manage all of the physical content I have laying around too? If I can “find a way to decrypt my DVD” (hello VLC), then iTunes can make a copy of it. This has actually been rumored and I would love to see it come to fruition.

5. Support for HD content on iPhone & iPods

While at first this really doesn’t seem like an iTunes feature, I personally hate having to maintain two copies of content with compatible versions for my Apple TV and Mac (HD content) and my iPods and iPhone (SD content). For some cases this isn’t a problem, but I find myself watching a lot of HD podcasts and they simply will not sync. If Apple could resolve this issue, users wouldn’t have to download iTunes Store content like TV shows twice (one in HD and one in SD). They could just download the HD file and be ready to rock.

6. More Robust Tagging

There are lots of apps available (like MetaX) that give users the ability to tag their content with more useful information than what iTunes allows them to do on their own. Content from the iTunes Store features some of this useful information (like movie director, actors, etc.). Why can’t I edit this for my own content directly within iTunes? Why can’t I tag my own music as clean or explicit from within iTunes?

7. Lyric & Metadata Lookups

iTunes has the ability to lookup artwork for our own music that may be missing covers, but now that iPhones and iPods support lyrics, wouldn’t it be great if iTunes could search, download and tag your files with the appropriate lyrics? Better yet, it would be even better if iTunes could fill in missing metadata information like some third-party apps do.

8. More Robust Sharing Support

iTunes 4 brought about the ability to stream playlists to other iTunes users on a local network. This feature was hacked to allow users to stream across the Internet and Apple quickly released a patch to fix this. Since then, several vendors, first and foremost being SimplifyMedia, have risen up to provide this service again. While SimplifyMedia is great, a more ideal solution would show you your entire iTunes library, with podcasts, audiobooks, TV shows, and the like. To be honest, if Apple even rolled this out as a feature exclusive to Mobile Me users, and allowed the ability to view this content streamed via me.com, that would be enough to justify a membership to me.

9. Music Videos

Probably the smallest of all the content types in my library, music videos are just lumped together in my main library. How come there isn’t a separate section for music videos?

10. Easier Syncing Between Multiple Macs

At the moment, I sync my iPhone on my iMac, where the bulk of my media is stored (simply because it has the biggest hard drive). It would be great if I could sync my iPhone or iPods there for some content, but sync it to my laptop for contacts, calendars and iPhone apps as that content changes more frequently.

In short order, we’ll actually see what Apple announces at its media event. In the meantime, what features would you like to see added to iTunes 9?

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Users are instructed to

1. Download and install iTunes 7.2, which is said to have a fix for the problem.
2. Delete the affected audiobook from your iTunes Library.
3. Connect your iPod to your computer and sync.
4. Select ‘Check for Purchases’ from the Store menu of iTunes to download the corrected version of the audiobook.
5. After the files have downloaded, sync your iPod once more.

The corrected audiobooks are added to the download queue at no charge and can also be retrieved by clicking this link.

Make sure that when you first sync your iPod after deleting the affected audiobook, you do not choose to Transfer Purchases from your iPod to iTunes, or you’ll simply be adding the affected audiobook back into your iTunes Library.

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