Ripping CD Audiobooks

[Bolo_Grubb]

We already own all the Harry Potter books on CD and enjoy listening to these while on long drives (we often drive to Vacation destinations).

I would like to rip these to MP3 files to play on my wife's Sanza Fuze MP3 player. They take up alot of room if I just use windows media player to rip them. The Fuze take a micro SD card, so it would be handy if we can compress the books a bit and put them all on one micro SD card.

I have tried CDex and ripped them 48kbps and the quality is ok, but not great. The other problem with this method is the use of the database that CDex uses to name the tracks.

Also it seems to start over wsith the track numbering once it hits 255. Even when I make sure it is set to ID3 tags ver. 2

ANother problem we have with this is that no matter what we do it sees some of the tracks as music instead of audiobooks.

So I am looking for suggestions.

Is there a software package that will rip each CD as 1 track?

What does anyone else do?

[CrowdAds]

[Cipher7]

This might be what you are looking for: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

I hope the following helps. Rather than ripping the entire CD as a single track (which makes it time consuming to scan to a specific spot in the audiobook), I do the following when ripping audiobooks:

- Rip each CD as a separate album, using the same album title but following it with a roman numeral to ensure that the albums are sorted correctly. For example (using the audiobook "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" as an example), I named the first disc of the first audiobook "The Bad Beginning I" and the second disc of the first audiobook "The Bad Beginning II," and so on for the rest of the audiobook.

- Precede each file name and song title with the track number to ensure they play in the correct order regardless of the track's specific title. When naming tracks I use the following scheme:

- A letter to indicate the disc number (A = first disc, B = second disc, and so on)

- A two-digit number to indicate the track number (C10 would be the tenth track on the third disc)

- A space and then the text for the specific name of the track (if needed/wanted)

As far as ensuring the tracks are clearly identified as an audiobook, rather than as music, I use a program called "MP3Tag" to edit the track information. MP3Tag allows you to edit all of the track information for your files, including the track's genre. To ensure that my audiobooks are clearly indentified, I set the genre for my audiobooks as "Books & Spoken" (one of the default genres available)

As I said at the beginning, I hope this helps you.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by Bolo_Grubb

We already own all the Harry Potter books on CD and enjoy listening to these while on long drives (we often drive to Vacation destinations).

I would like to rip these to MP3 files to play on my wife's Sanza Fuze MP3 player. They take up alot of room if I just use windows media player to rip them. The Fuze take a micro SD card, so it would be handy if we can compress the books a bit and put them all on one micro SD card.

I have tried CDex and ripped them 48kbps and the quality is ok, but not great. The other problem with this method is the use of the database that CDex uses to name the tracks.

Also it seems to start over wsith the track numbering once it hits 255. Even when I make sure it is set to ID3 tags ver. 2

ANother problem we have with this is that no matter what we do it sees some of the tracks as music instead of audiobooks.

So I am looking for suggestions.

Is there a software package that will rip each CD as 1 track?

What does anyone else do?

CDEX is a good program for this. I personally use dbPoweramp but it's just what I'm used to. If I'd tried CDEX first I'd probably be using it.

One of the features of CDEX that's really nice (and that dbPowerAmp doesn't have) is the ability to create a single file from the entire CD. Having fewer files to deal with makes life much easier on the player. You can then combine those into an even larger single file using the freeware MP3 Merger.

I generally make a single file of books up to about 12 hours and if the book is longer than that I'll break it up into 2 or more 8 hour files. No particular reason for these numbers. It's just what I'm used to doing. I once looked up in the MP3 standard how long a file a player should be able to handle to meet the standard. I can't remember if it said 13 or 15 or 18 hours but it was something like that, so I just play it safe and don't let it go much over 12. I could look it up again but I'm lazy.

The Sansa Fuze (and most other modern players) handle files of that length very nicely and it really makes it a lot easier. If you do lose your place the Fuze accellerates when you fast forward or rewind so getting back to where you were is trivial as long as you have some idea where you were. With that in mind I make a mental note of the time into the file every time I start listening, and usually a few times as I listen.

Barry