Splasm Software Discussions

I am currently ripping a book of short stories. Some stories are quite short (ten minutes or so), and comprise only one track. Others are longer (one is almost two hours) and comprise up to 10 tracks or so. I have organized the "chapters" in ABB to correspond to the individual short stories, rather than the original CD track contents. I used the Join command on each set of tracks within a chapter -- although nothing visibly changed when I did so.

I want to finish my audiobook so that each short story is a separate track. So far, I can't find a way to do this. I have specified part size at the minimum (one hour), but even so, when I finalize my book, I get three or more stories in one part/track and long stories split into several parts/tracks, often mixed in with other briefer stories. Definitely not what I want, or what makes sense.

Is there any way to force ABB to make each chapter a separate part/track?

Thanks.

There isn't a way at present to specify which Part each Chapter will end up in - as you've found, they're automatically placed in Parts until the specified maximum Part length is reached. To ensure each Part is made up of only one short story you could treat each Audiobook Builder Project as a single short story. Create a Project, name it appropriately (ie. "Title, Chapter XX"), add/import the tracks for each story, build, then repeat for the next short story.

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com

Thanks for the quick reply. Shortly after my initial post, the same idea you had occured to me as well:



Of course, there's a major drawback to this technique. If a disc contains four short stories, for example, I would have to rip the disc four times, discarding the unwanted tracks each time. That's four times the amount of work that it should be to accomplish the task.

Another example is a 36-disc lecture series I'm currently ripping. Some topics are only half an hour (half a disc), others as long as two hours (two discs) or more. Using your technique to make one track=one topic is just too mind-bogglingly complicated, repetitious, and time consuming. And that's what your program is meant to avoid, isn't it?

I've been using your program a lot lately -- it's a great concept. But I now realize that the major reason it took me so long to understand the program and use it is exactly the above problem. Dividing an audiobook by actual chapters or topics is natural and intuitive; dividing it by length is simply arbitrary. And since you already give us a simple and easy way to organize our audiobooks by (real) chapters or topics (in the chapters list) -- why oh why don't you let us create tracks based on this organization?

So here's my suggestion for an essential improvement: give users a way to add "manual track breaks" in the chapter list, or simply add an option so that each "chapter" in the chapter list is converted into a separate track. Do that and you've got a truly terrific program.

I agree with your suggestion to allow users to manually specify track breaks. Until that happens, though, you could rip the entire CD (or collection of CDs) once and save the project. Then change the title, remove the chapters/tracks you don't want, and build. Then use the File>Revert command to restore the project, change the title, remove unwanted chapters, and build the next audiobook. Then revert again, etc. Continue until done with all the audiobooks you want to build--just don't save the project while you're doing this. Still extra work, but you wouldn't have to re-rip the CD.

OK, good suggestion. Will come in handy with the 48-disc lecture series I'm ripping.

But I do look forward to your implementing manual track breaks!

Many thanks, again, for your help.

This may not help you very much, but over the weekend I just bought a new iPod Classic, and I thought I'd let you know that the new interface on these iPods does show chapter names for audiobooks. So if you're in the market for a new one anyway, then you might keep that in mind.

I have one CD with poems. I want to see:

1. Only the one Audiobook for this book of poems in the list of iTunes and of my iPod (classic).

2. I want to able to skip from one track to the next. So each track must be chapter in Your therm.

Generally the tracks bring the best structure for an audiobook. I can not understand, why this is not the standard structure.
Tino