What would you consider the best way to build your own library of audi

2015-07-04 14:43:45

Greetings,

A few weeks ago I managed to blow my RAID-5 array and with it I lost a few audiobooks that I had ripped from CD's so now I'm about to re-rip the collection. But this time around I'm looking to do things way better compared to last time. Last time I simply went with a "toss it into iTunes, select 64 kbps AAC (High Efficiency) and call it a day, with some added album arts and tags.

This time around I want to do it properly. With properly I mean I'd really want to avoid getting loads of tracks for each audiobook. It doesn't feel user-friendly, it doesn't feel modern and it makes me loose all control as having these folders with 80 different tracks on the smallest book, and like 360+ on the larger one is a complete mess and I would never be able to notice if a track or two was lost or corrupted or whatever. Another annoying part was naming the various tracks to ensure they are played in the correct order as some music players seem to handle things differently so some would suddenly start to playback Track 01 - CD 01, Track 01 - CD 02, Track 01 - CD 03 instead of moving Track 01 - CD 01, Track 02 - CD 01, Track 3 - CD 01 before moving to Track 1 - CD 02 and all kinds of different headaches. Luckily we are mostly using the default Music.app in iOS which handled things nicely, only exception was the new player introduced with iOS 7 which suddenly started to take the Track 01 - CD 01, Track 01 - CD 02, Track 01 - CD 03 route but it was fixed in iOS 7.0.1 or whatever it was.


But of course, the best thing is to ensure you never have to deal with headaches like that to begin with by starting to move away from this 80+ tracks per audiobook nonsense. Some of you might say that solutions like Audible would be much better providing much less of a hassle and whatnot. The thing is, we use Audible all the time and besides the software being fuzzy at times it's great to use. It's easy, efficient, the quality is decent (I think their "high-quality" is providing 64 kbps MP3 or AAC?) and everything is working good enough. But as huge Harry Potter nerds we need our Harry Potter audiobooks, one complete set in Norwegian as we love the reader of those and the originals in English with Stephen Fry and as the owners of the Harry Potter brand do love their money they have taken the audiobooks off from Audible, iTunes Store and whatnot and the Norwegian ones have never been available on any of these services to begin with.


So here we are!



What do I want to achieve? I want to achieve the best and most user-friendly end-results as possible. I do think the best thing would be to have each audiobook being only one single file, if at all possible. I don't know if there might be some size restrictions? But as few as possible is the goal as it much easier to handle and keep track of. But with merging tracks you have one huge problem arising, how on earth are you going to keep track on where you are during playback? Of course M4B (AAC) files features it's "remember where I left off" capabilities but what if you listen while in bed and you fall a sleep and when you wake up you have advanced like 5-8 hours since you fell a sleep? If you are listening to a 30 hours+ audiobook merged into a single file you will have a really hard time getting back to where you left off before you fell a sleep.

After what I understand you are able to insert "chapters" into M4B / audiobooks? So even if your 30 hours audiobook is merged into a single file, your music player will feature chapters that behaves more or less like regular tracks which you are able to jump between? The ideal thing would be to have a chapter for each actual chapter in the audiobook, but I highly doubt any real database exists that could tell me when exactly each chapter starts in the audiobook so unless I spend the next month or so listening through each and every audiobook and note down when it chapter changes during the playback it would be impossible to get that correctly. But I guess there are some software out there which will add chapters automatically on a set interval? So lets say they insert a chapter every 15 min, 20 min or 30 min or something so you at least have something to navigate from.



What would be the best way in order to re-rip my audiobooks and re-build my library the optimal way not only in-terms of quality but also in-terms of making everything as fluid and user-friendly as possible for playback? I'm considering to start of with ripping the library and fixing everything in lossless, simply to have a lossless copy of everything so I won't ever need to re-rip it all again. It's not very fun to rip audiobooks consisting of 15-30 CD's... And then I could simply convert from the lossless collection to whatever suits the device and usage the best.

As we are only using iOS-devices I guess AAC with M4B is the optimal way to go. In terms of bitrate I'm not entirely sure, it's been a long time since I ripped anything really. What do you think is the optimal bitrate to go for and is the AAC HE (High Efficiency) something I should or should not use? And what is considered the best software in order to achieve my goals? Back when I ripped music I tend to use EAC and dbPowerAMP but I'm not really sure what's considered the gold standard these days and whether they would actually work in-terms of merging and adding chapters and what not? Or should I perhaps rip everything track-for-track and do the merging and chaptering afterwards?



All help and tips is appreciated!

What would you consider the best way to build your own library of audi

Reply #1 – 2015-07-05 10:09:25

So in what format are they now, this audiobooks?
What raid5 is that? (Lacie?)