5G iPod Problems with Audiobooks, revisited
By tunequest March 14, 2008
Lately I’ve been on a tear with audiobooks, managing to cram a number of books in between my regular music and podcast listening. The sudden upswing in interest has prompted me to renew my investigation of the problems the 5G (fifth generation) model iPod has with long-playing books. As I noted last summer, the 5G has troubles with homemade m4b files (bookmarkable AAC) longer than a certain play time.
The iPod will suddenly stop playing an audiobook within a few minutes and return to the main menu. This happens when resuming a book, after having listened to something else or resyncing the device, basically anything that stops rather than pauses the book. When selecting the book again, the iPod starts from the beginning, having lost the bookmark and updating the play count/date as though it had properly finished playing.
Since I knew I would be delving into book territory, I decided to figure out the optimum way of working around the iPod’s inexplicable limitation. And really, for all my experimentation, the only concrete result I’ve been able to find is: 4 hours. 4 hours is about the maximum running time of any homemade m4b audiobook file before the iPod starts wigging out about it. It didn’t matter what I used for my encoding settings, my sample rates, or bit rates or channels or workflow or program. No combination of settings allowed the iPod to play longer than 4 hours without a hiccup, always stopping in the middle of the same phrase.
I even tried this little ingenious trick:
I manually set the audiobook’s options in iTunes so that the start time was at the 4 hour mark, hoping to persuade my iPod to at least go for another 4 hours. No dice.
I can say however that the sample rate seems to have the most effect on how long you can listen before the iPod won’t let you pick up where you left off. 22 kHz seems to be the trick. Whether your book is stereo or mono seems to matter little, giving about the same performance. Same for bitrate. However, higher sampling rates seems to reduce the amount of time before you lose the bookmark feature.
There probably are a handful more combinations and techniques I could try, but it takes quite a while to join, encode, test and evaluate each option. If anyone finds something with significantly different results, feel free to drop a line this way.
In the meantime, I’m glad Audiobook Builder can set a Maximum Part length and will split files so that nothing is longer than what I need them to be. It’s a groovy little workaround.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:22 am
Ive had the same problem and its really getting on my nerves. Maybe suggesting a fix for this to Apple might help
[Reply]
April 1st, 2008 at 12:23 am
O, and is that audiobook builder just for macs?
[Reply]
tunequest Reply:
April 18th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Unfortunately for Windows users, the two straight-forward methods I know for creating audiobooks are Mac only: the Audiobook Builder program and an Applescript called Join Together.
The process certainly is doable on Windows however. You have to splice your audio together, convert it to AAC/M4A and then just change to file extension to M4B before copying it to your iPod. But I don’t know of any Windows solutions that will do all that with “one click.”
[Reply]
June 18th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
There’s a nice little free windows program (MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter ) that creates m4bs, joins mp3s, etc. in one click: http://www.freeipodsoftware.com/
I’m also having this problem with my 5.5G ipod. If anyone comes up with a solution, please post. Thanks!
[Reply]
June 25th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I experienced this problem (rarely), but only with Audible files on my 5.5G iPod
With the new 160GB Classic I haven’t seen the problem at all. In fact I’ve been converting my 2 part books into 1 part books. It’s nice to not have as many files floating around.
[Reply]
September 28th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
I have this problem too off and on. I think it has something to do with the disk drive spin-up time timer that is programed into our 5th gen ipods. Some drives seem to go to sleep and not wake up or take a longer time to wake up. There is little quesiton in my mind it is drive related. I have found my 5.5 gen will often not load the audiobook at all when it is first being used. Sometimes I press the Audiobook menu and the list of books is blank ! I reboot my Ipod and they show back up on the menu. If I use the Ipod for awhile it seems to load them better and also after some use plays the files mostly but not always without problems. The file size limit of 4 hours is not something I have found as stated by other posters…although I have had random problems files of any size at times. I have found by searching the internet a file size limit of 13 hours…more on that below.. One trick I have used when trying to get my audiobook started is that I press play wait a second then quickly press pause then wait 5 seconds. After this I press Play again and most of the time it plays for some reason…I think disk drive related…it seems to read the first block from there out of the audiobook. If it does not do it’s first seek and misses starting the audiobook…it will reset where I am on the book and I like others have to refind my place. Gurr.
Talking about file sizes, the absolute file size that I have found is 13 hours or about 330mb for books convered to M4B files. If longer than 13 hours or 330mb I can count on problems. I found others that have hit this limit and there is some posting on the interent about this. Books longer than this must be split into 2 files for sure. Also…I make sure the files converted are set to MONO only for audiobooks and recorded at 48 to96 kbps max. This I have read helps with these problems and my experience of over a year agrees with this. YMMV of course.
I sent my 5.5 gen back to apple during warrentee but they “could not find a problem” and shipped it back with no hardware change at all. I am not happy with this, my first Ipod, as they don’t have the bugs worked out of it one bit and I am fairly certain they will no longer update this model with new software. I did take out an applecare and might proceed in getting the drive changed through apple as I can’t believe all 5.5gens have this same problem. I can live with the problems in my case but have to constantly reboot and play games to get this thing to play audiobooks correctly, esp when cold.
As you all know we seem to forgive Apple of these sins when we would never do the same for almost any other company…I don’t know really why they get away with it but the public is forgiving to this company and they really have the only show in town. The Ipod is so much better than anyone elses device that probably I will buy newer one even if I can’t get this one to work right. Now that is sick !!
[Reply]
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm
This problem is finally solved in itunes 8. Rather than converting mp3s to m4b in order to make audiobooks, you can now tell itunes to treat regular mp3s like audiobooks.
It’s explained here on lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5064539/itunes-8-makes-it-easy-to-convert-any-file-to-an-audiobook
I’ve been using this for the last few weeks on my 5.5 gen and haven’t had any of my old audiobook restart problems. Hope this helps.
[Reply]
tunequest Reply:
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
That’s some good news, stm. I haven’t upgraded yet to iTunes 8 so I hadn’t seen that. Do you know if older iPod’s respect the setting with regards to variable playback speeds?
[Reply]
stm Reply:
November 7th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
On my 5.5 variable playback speeds work fine with the new itunes 8 audiobook setting.
[Reply]
tunequest Reply:
November 9th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Great! That’s good to know. Thank you.
[Reply]