When I tested my new audiobook out, I thought I’d take a look at Books’ other features for audiobooks. The concatenated audiobook is then generated, saved and added to your audiobooks in the Books app. In the Finish tab, click on Build Audiobook. You end up with a single book, within which are each of the tracks. Then, ensuring that they’re in the right order, click on its Join tool to concatenate them. You can drag and drop audiobook tracks from Music into Audiobook Builder’s window. So I removed my 37 individual audiobook tracks from Books and started again in Music. It will import them direct from audio CD, or tracks in iTunes or Music. My choice is Audiobook Builder, modestly priced and well reviewed.ĭespite its name, and the fact that Catalina shipped over six months ago, Audiobook Builder doesn’t currently work with audiobook tracks imported to Books. I have the same problem with my LibriVox audiobooks, which come as many individual tracks.Īs usual where Apple has left a gaping hole in the functionality of its bundled apps, I went to the App Store to find a solution. I may as well have imported my audiobook into Music, where it would have worked better than in Books. You have to manually move to the next and start that playing. Not only that, but unlike Music, Books won’t play these audiobook tracks consecutively: it plays one, then stops.

I tried putting all the files into a Collection, and still couldn’t join them into one continuous audiobook. A litle while later, I was less than impressed when my audiobook library had grown by 37 titles, one for every single track on my audiobook CD.Īt that stage, I realised that there must be a command to concatenate all those files, so I selected them all and looked. Thinking I was onto a winner, I used the Add to Library… command in its File menu, selecting the CD itself rather than the many tracks on it. I hooked up my optical drive, inserted an audiobook CD, dismissed Music from any involvement, and opened the Books app instead. I naively followed the instructions in Books’ Help book. This article explains my answer of “well…”. Someone asked me how easy it would be to import audiobooks from CD. When Catalina first came out, I heard howls of anguish from some users who had many audiobooks, which didn’t seem to be working at all well, so I kept well clear of the audiobooks feature in the revamped Books app. Since then, I have bought some audiobooks from the iTunes Store, which worked out rather better, and downloaded a few LibriVox titles. I don’t have many, but several of those I wanted to listen to were on CD, so I tried importing them into iTunes, giving up in frustration when I ended up with hundreds of unknown tracks. Prior to Catalina, I found audiobooks hard going on my Mac.

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