What I would like to see is the ability to insert a Part Break into the list of chapters in the Chapters pane.
The idea is conceptualy similar to a manual Page Break in Microsoft Word. Word automatically "soft" breaks pages when the document's content fills one page and spills to the next. Word makes fairly reasonable choices about where to put a soft break, and normally that's all you care about.
Sometimes, though, the break is awkward, and you'd like to manually break the page a little earlier, so that the new page will start more naturally. So you insert a manual Page Break, and the page will *always* break there, ending the existing page early.
So likewise, a manual Part Break would be something you could insert into the chapters list to "break" to a new part at that point. That point would need to be sooner than the 12 hour (or user's preference) normal break mark.
This all sounds rather complicated, but from a UI standpoint, it would just be a new icon in the toolbar (Add Part Break), and a new element in the list that would basically have an icon and a line across the list to indicate a break. I think it would be extremely easy to understand.
You might also consider showing the "soft" breaks in the list, with a slightly different visual, to let users know where the automatic part breaks are going to occur.
Word does something like this, and as odd as it seems, I think it's actually a good metaphor. It's easiest to see how Word displays the different breaks when you're in the "Normal" view mode, instead of the Page Layout view.
Then again, sometimes less is more. One of the things that makes Audiobook Builder easy and useful is how simple it can be. Handling the parts behind the scenes is part of making things simpler.
Then again, the Chapters pane and chapters list, with chapters containing files, is already complicated, if you're trying to do much beyond taking what Audiobook Builder creates on its own. So maybe adding breaks is something that wouldn't be that bad, because most people don't fiddle in there anyway.
_________________ Aldo on Audiobooks -- http://aldoblog.com/audiobooks/
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