Section 50. Listen to an Audiobook


50. Listen to an Audiobook

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

20 Purchase Audio from the iTunes Music Store

33 Find and Play Music

46 Find and Play Music on the iPod


An audiobook is a special kind of digital music file that has some interesting and unique properties: namely, iTunes and the iPod both know how to keep track of where you stop listening to one. This is pretty important, considering that audiobookswhich are essentially the digital music equivalent of books on tape, and thus have an entire spoken-word version of a full-length book encoded into a single digital audio fileare typically very long, often several hours in length. (Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is almost 61 hours long.) You aren't going to be able to listen to an entire audiobook all in one sitting, and you don't want to have to seek your way back to the point where you last stopped it every time you want to resume. You might even want to pause the audiobook in iTunes, resume listening to it on the iPod, and then switch back to iTunes for the remainderand you particularly don't want to have to try to find your place in the file while you're jogging or driving.

NOTE

Audiobooks are a little more specialized than simply being AAC or MP3 files whose Genre is set to Audiobooks . Automatic resuming is only possible on audiobooks you purchase through the iTunes Music Store or through Audible (http://www.audible.com), a service that sells audiobooks in a manner similar to the iTunes Music Store . If you have an Audible account, audiobooks you purchase from Audible can be played in iTunes. Click the Set button next to Use iTunes for Internet Music Playback in the General tab of the iTunes Preferences window to ensure that iTunes can accept Audible's streamed content.


With iTunes and the iPod, it's easy to keep your place in an audiobookin fact, it's automatic. Every time you stop playing the file, iTunes saves your place. When you want to start "reading" again, just select the file and press Play , and iTunes picks up again right where you left off. The same goes for the iPodit remembers where you stopped playback last time (even if that was in iTunes) and resumes at that point. Synchronizing the iPod with iTunes ensures that the stopping point is always preserved regardless of where you want to pick up the audiobook again.

50. Listen to an Audiobook


TIP

Owners of 4G iPods (including the iPod photo) have the option to play back audiobooks at any of three different pitch-adjusted speeds: Normal, Slower , or Faster . Choose one of these settings from the Audiobooks submenu of the Settings menu (under the Main Menu screen).


1.
Listen to an Audiobook in iTunes

Navigate to the location of an audiobook you purchased from the iTunes Music Store or from Audible. These audiobooks can be anything from novels or non- fiction texts to radio shows, political speeches, or magazine articles, and are most easily found by navigating to the Audiobooks option in the Genre list.

Play the audiobook as you would any other song or music file: Double-click its name or select it and click Play . Listen for as long as you like, and then stop playback by clicking Pause , starting another song playing, or quitting iTunes.

NOTE

An audiobook works the same way if you first start listening to it on the iPod: just press Play/Pause or skip to another song, and your place is saved.

2.
Return to the Point Where You Left Off

The next time you want to return to the audiobook, simply select it and play it again; instead of starting over at the beginning, iTunes remembers where you last stopped and resumes playback at that exact point.

TIP

To give yourself some context and a refresher about where you were in the audio stream, click and hold the Back button for several seconds to rewind the track. You can also drag the playhead all the way to the left in the scrub bar to start the audiobook over from the beginning.

3.
Listen to an Audiobook on the iPod

Synchronize your iTunes Library with your iPod as discussed in 42 Transfer Your Music to Your iPod . On the iPod, an audiobook behaves just like any other audio track: You can navigate to it by its artist (usually the author, but sometimes the person narrating the book) or by the title (found in the Songs listing). The album name is usually set to the same text as the title.

Play the audiobook by selecting it and pressing Select or Play/Pause . Listen for as long as you like; when you want to stop, press Play/Pause again.

4.
Skip Between Chapters on the iPod

On the iPod, you can skip between internal chapter marks within the audiobook track. While the track is playing, press the Select button to change to scrub mode; the chapter marks are visible in the scrub bar. You can scrub manually to a specific point as you can with a regular track, or use the Forward and Back buttons to move directly to a chapter break point.

5.
Synchronize Your iPod with iTunes

Connect your iPod to your computer using the Dock or included cable, as described in 42 Transfer Your Music to Your iPod . During this process, the point at which you last stopped listening to the audiobook is synchronized with iTunes and saved as part of the information about the audiobook file.

NOTE

If you listened to the audiobook on the iPod as well as in iTunes, the stopping point that "wins" is the one that occurred more recently.

6.
Return to the Point Where You Left Off

Play the audiobook in iTunes. The audio track resumes where you left off listening on the iPod, just as though you'd done so in iTunes.

When you reach the end of the audiobook, the next time you play it, it begins at the beginning.



iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap
iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328992
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 152
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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