synching music to iphone ios with swinsian

There’s very little joined up thinking going on at Apple these days. As someone said in response to an earlier article, the devs obviously just sling in a dozen or so items to store and just make it work for that. Not just because it may not suit some of us, but it is fundamentally unworkable for anyone with a large Audiobook collection and that’s unforgivable. This new Audiobooks issue is really shortsighted. I gave up and simply keep everything together on an external drive, set iTunes to look there, but also use an alias to that same external media folder in the default location so if anything went wrong and iTunes forgot where it had been pointed, it would default back to that same location. It always ‘looked behind’ what was being presented by the file system and then refuse to work if that underlying structure was not what it demanded. I wanted different media stored in different locations and I even tried automounting different shares onto each of its media folders, but again, iTunes did not behave in the correct and standard manner. If individual media folders were symlinks, it would read the content ok, but would not be able to write anything. I found it would work if its entire media folder was an alias, but I seem to recall not with a symlink. ITunes had a non standard use of symlinks. The iOS 6 Music app is actually excellent for audiobooks, but that is now long gone unless you’re using a very old iPod touch. I tried Bookmobile, but it crashes a lot and didn’t work well on my iPod touch 5th generation. What’s even more frustrating is that there don’t seem to be any good alternatives to Books for listening to audiobooks on iOS. It’s clear that Apple hasn’t properly considered anything beyond the use case where people buy audiobooks from the Books Store. I will probably end up making a symlink from the default audiobook location to an external drive, but this kind of thing is extremely irritating. Essentially, I don’t think the iOS Music app is workable for my audiobook use, without a lot of extra effort and time to redo my audiobooks. So the audio track is already joined, no easy/quick way to split it. And in other cases, I extract audio tracks from films I’ve ripped to turn them into ‘audiobooks’. Some audiobooks I have don’t have tracks that split on chapter boundaries, so embedded chapter marks are the only way to navigate them. Learn more about the new media apps that replace iTunes in macOS Catalina in my new book, Take Control of macOS Media Apps. So, if you do have a large audiobook library, make plans before upgrading to macOS Catalina. It’s a good idea to set the genre to something like Spoken Word so you can find them easily. You just leave them as music files, and they will show up in your Music library. If you do want to keep them in the Music app, you no longer have to change the media kind to Audiobook for them to show up in the Audiobooks library, because that will be gone.

But you can move these audiobook files to the Books app, and each file name shows up as an individual chapter, allowing you to navigate in your audiobooks more easily. Note that when you now go to rip new audiobooks, you must do this in the Music app there is no such option in the Books app. This allows you to store the audiobook files on an external drive, if you don’t have enough space on your Mac’s startup drive. If you rip audiobook CDs, their files can stay in your Music library, and you can listen to them in the Music app, sync them to an iOS device, and even put them in your iCloud Music Library, if the bit rate is 96 kbps or above. Or you can keep your audiobooks in your Music library.

(Audiobooks will be stored in a folder in the Library folder of your home folder: ~/Library/Containers/.) At other times, store them on an external disk. However, these files are stored on your startup disk, and you may simply not have enough space on this disk, so if you have a large audiobooks library and want all your audiobooks in the Books app, I recommend only adding those to the app when you want to listen to them. For example, you click buttons to skip ahead or back by 15 seconds, set a sleep timer, and more. You can move your audiobooks to the Books app, which offers a number of features for playback that are more appropriate for listening to spoken word. But if you have a collection of audiobooks that you have ripped, or downloaded without DRM, then you have two options for managing audiobooks in a post-iTunes world.

If you have audiobooks from Audible or from the iTunes Store – technically the Books Store – you have no choice: they can only be stored in the books app. With the split of iTunes into four apps, the way audiobooks are managed is different.

Synching music to iphone ios with swinsian