Any way to burn only one of the CDs in an audiobook?

[jsw]

I'm a big fan of Audible. However, there have been times when I've been burning a book to CD to listen in the car, and iTunes messes up one of the CDs in the middle of the book (i.e., the book takes, say, 8 CDs, and the burn screws up disk 4).

Does anyone know of any way to burn only certain portions of the book (i.e., disk 4 in the above example). The only option I've had is to start over from the beginning. Not fun.

Or, I guess, is there any way to convert Audible content to some form I could edit (and then extract the "disk 4" portion for burning)?

Yes, I know I could just copy it to an iPod. I don't have one, though. I have a crappy old MP3 player my wife bought me years ago and I can't get an iPod until it breaks, and I think she'd notice hammer marks on the shattered remains. Plus, I don't have the bucks to get one now.

 

[SilentPanda]

I don't know specifically for Audible content but I know for mp3's and such if you bring up the info (with the album cover and such) you can set the start and end time of the track. Then when you burn that track it chops off anything not in that time frame. So you might try that.... just set it to where the beginning and ending of that CD is supposed to be.

 

[musicpyrite]

There's a program that came with my iMac called Sound Studio, which lets you edit sound files, you could use that. (though I think it only comes with iBooks, eMacs, and iMacs)

You could search versiontracker for a free program similar to Sound Studio, if you don't have the program.

 

[SilentPanda]

Will that program edit Audble files though? They aren't supposed to be editable in such a fashion (not that that's stopped anybody before).

 

[stoid]

All audible files have a DRM. Think FairPlay. Think no way to edit it. Will the book fit in mp3 format on your current mp3 player?

 

[SilentPanda]

That's why I'm thinking you can just adjust the start track and end track times in iTunes. You can do this just fine with Protected AAC files... I'm pretty sure you can do it with Audible files... anybody tried it?

 

[yamabushi]

You could always play the digital content and record an analog stream to whatever format you like. The quality should stay plenty good enough for spoken content. You could leave it analog and record to cassette tape or reencode it as mp3 or other digital format via a loopback or a connection to another computer or digital recording device. The downside is that it is time consuming since you have to play the entire content at normal speed.

 

[jsw]

Thanks, all!

I think SilentPanda's suggestion of setting start/end times in iTunes will work best for me - I just occasionally need to burn a CD out of the middle (because of issues with burning multiple disc sets in iTunes that I wish they'd fix!), and this will work just fine for me - I can determine start and end times pretty easily, and burn that one CD I need - or continue burning from disc 'x' onward in case the burn failed completely midway through the set.

 

[seamuskrat]

I listen to a lot of audio books and sadly what you ask with Audible is hard.

The problem with audio books is that you cannot just select tracks, as many audible (and iTMS) give you three AAC files for the ENTIRE book. I have had luck choosing just one of the tracks and burning to CD. But then you have some overlap to get the content you need.

Really, the iPod is the best choice here. Start saving now and work up to it., Give up lunch out once a week or something. I drive 3 hours each way and without audiobooks I will go nuts and I love the iPod for that.