Wednesday, December 16, 2015

iTunes audiobooks: something actually worked

I’ve had such poor experiences with recent iTunes and iOS audiobook support my expectations are pretty bleak. So imagine the shock when something worked.

I recently ordered an audiobook from the Great Courses (aka The Teaching Company. Incidentally, never pay list price. They routinely have 70% discounts). It took me a while to sort out their cryptic download UI — you need to go to ‘My Digital Library” and then click on the book icon to view all tracks, then download one track a time. Once I was done with that I had a set of files in a folder. There was nothing in file names to show they were audiobook tracks; I assumed iTunes would treat them as music and I’d then have to fix the metadata up using Multi-Item Edit.

That’s not what happened. I dropped my folder into iTunes’ My Audiobooks pane and it showed up as an audiobook! Not only that, but the track titles showed correctly; I’ve gotten used to seeing just file names.

Incredibly, I saw the same thing after syncing to my iPhone. Proper book metadata, lectures in order, proper titles. 

Something actually worked. I’m not used to that…

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