A Booker wrote:
Valzho wrote:
In the spirit of some earlier posts, I thought I would post my current workflow for creating a single, VBR AAC-HE Audiobook from CDs
Thanks a lot for sharing this! I don't know Fission yet, but this sounds interesting.
So you are actually using Fission as the app that does the actual audio book building? Until this point what you are having is single .mp3 (is this the format that you export from "Audiobook Builder" into?) and/or .m4a (AAC) files?
If I got this right, I wonder why "Audiobook Builder" is needed after all? How do the chapter/title names that you set in the "Audiobook Builder" app transfer over to Fission? If it is in the file names and/or metadata only, why don't you rip the disks with iTunes into HE AAC right away (as one can set the track names and other metadata with iTunes, too) and then feed the files into Fission?
I use Audiobook Builder to import all the CDs. In that sense it's a great time saver because I only have to enter the book info once and it automatically imports and ejects until I'm done with all the discs in a book. In other words, it makes the actual disc ripping go much faster and smoother.
Then, Audiobook Builder works great for marking all the chapters. So, for example, one chapter might be spread across 10 tracks, but ABB will combine those into one file in its export. When everything is exported from ABB you'll end up with one file per chapter... e.g., you might have a 20-chapter book spread across 10 discs with 150 tracks. ABB lets you very quickly import that into 20 individual files (1 per chapter). Doing that in Fission is a flipping nightmare because you have to drag every single individual file into the editor. Also, I don't think Fission will rip from CD (not sure). You could import from iTunes, but iTunes won't combine the files and once again you're stuck dragging 150 individual files into Fission. Also, when you create the per-chapter files in ABB, the track names are already set correctly, so you don't even have to edit them in Fission—just drag them in in order.
In theory, you could bypass the ABB steps, but doing the track combination and chapter naming in ABB is waaaaaaaaay faster than doing that in Fission when all is said and done.
If Fission let you drag multiple files into a window at once, then it might be feasible to skip ABB (even though ABB joining and naming would still be faster). As it is, you can literally only drag one file at a time, which might be fine for other audio applications (e.g., building a podcast), but is terrible for building an audio book.
If Audiobook builder let you export a track longer than 13 hours, it would cut down a lot on time. I think you would probably still need to take it into Fission for a little cleanup (e.g., splitting out the intro or removing the disc change notifications), but it would go much faster without having to combine all the chapter files. If ABB had the same encoding options as iTunes (VBR AAC-HE) then that would save a ton of time also as you wouldn't have to re-encode the files in iTunes. If it did both, the time to export would be drastically cut down; you could just do everything in ABB and then do the minor cleanup in Fission