Thursday, January 08, 2009

iTunes Tip - Finding a home for ripped audiobooks

It better not be a secret to anyone that I'm a "heavy" user of iTunes. I'm also an avid music listener with a nasty obsession of owning every song ever recorded that doesn't suck.


Not long ago, I did get some audiobooks on CD. I ripped them at work on a machine that didn't have iTunes but a different ripping program. I'm not that big an iTunes snob, ripping a lot of stuff doesn't really matter which program you use.

I had, at the time, every Harry Potter book on CD. Sweet! They are, in fact, good listening. Somewhere along the way, though, I noticed that these files were showing up in "Music". Extremely frustrating. Without these audiobook files I have 57.6 Days worth of music. Add these couple hundred files in and...well, I'm a bit OCD when it comes to my music. They shouldn't be here.

I tried changing their Genre to "Audiobook" - ya think? Well, the genre was correct but these files were STILL in Music. 

Just a couple of days ago I finally had enough. I found the property value on the file to move it to the audiobook section in iTunes.

On the "Options" tab of the properties of a file, there is a setting called "Media Kind" - change that to Audiobooks and WHIZ, BANG, BOOM! They vanish from Music and appear in Audiobooks.

Another of life's mysteries solved.

If you already knew this, why the hell didn't you tell me? If you don't care? Ok. Fine. Whatever. I thought I'd at least be friendly and share something extremely exciting to me. Meh.

In other news:

I did a cross between the read all button and the read all never sleep again methods in Google Reader. I pretty much just zoomed through last night stopping if I could clearly define the topic of a post in the first couple sentences. Many of us are too scatterbrained to get to the point (no worries, I'm TERRIBLE at it) so I took about an 2 hours but I finally got my unread posts count to Zero. That lasted about 5 minutes, but hey, it was better then it was. My sincerest apologies if I missed something important. Oh! Mike...you are free to keep on truckin'.

Here's couple of items that's I found spreadable like a nice jar of Cheez Whiz:

Nap Warden did an awesome job on Weaselmomma's site redux.
Greg and Nellie are having a baby.

There were so many more, but alas, it's Thursday and my mind can't stop thinking about Friday.

4 comments:

terri said...

On the whole itunes issue, let me just say, "Huh?" I'm not as technologically advanced as I'd like to think I am. Congrats on resolving your issue as well as clearing out your reader!

nonna said...

i am a newbie to iTunes, but i wanted to know (and tried to search on my own) if there is a way to transfer games, etc from one ipod to another. like if my s.son had paid for a game and i wanted it but didn't want to pay for it (cuz i'm broke AND cheap like that)
so do you know any secrets like that??

i'm glad you got caught up on all of your reading! i was really worried and stressed about you be stressed about it.



ok, i lied. i forgot all about that conversation until i read your post just now. ;)

OhCaptain said...

terri: don't worry about keeping up on my iTunes issues. I have deep issues ;) I listen to music at work all day using it and have developed some OCD traits.

nonna: Games are like music and movies and such. You need to have each device registered to the same account in iTunes. That's the account that purchased them. If you purchased them with different accounts, that would be hacking in a way that gets you quality alone time in the gray bar hotel or at least sued.

Thanks for worrying about me :)

dmarks said...

You wizard. You solved the Harry Potter problem!