DISCLAIMER: The below technique works about half of the time: For no readily discernible reason, some of the files come out in chipmunk mode. It appears, from what I've been able to determine so far, that mpg123 is playing the original mp3 file at the wrong speed.
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As a fan of Librivox, it's frustrating to me that the iPod doesn't recognize audio books in mp3 format as audio books. It wants them in aac format. Converting them is a hassle, mostly because I always forget how. So, here's a little Perl script I whipped up for the purpose.
The same thing is necessary if you rip an audiobook from CD.
Share and enjoy:
#!/usr/bin/perl
opendir F,".";
my @files = readdir(F);
closedir F;
foreach my $chapter (@files) {
next unless $chapter =~ m/\.mp3$/i;
my $filename = $chapter;
$filename =~ s/\.mp3$//;
$filename = $filename . '.m4b';
`mpg123 -s "$chapter" | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o "$filename" -`;
}
Note that while this retains the track name, it seems to lose the album name and author, so you may need to add that back. Presumably faac has command-line arguments for this, too, but I haven't found them yet. Haven't looked, either.
You should be aware that while faac generally works, its a pretty crappy encoder and can generate invalid aac files. YMMV
Excellent! Thanks for this trick. It's unfortunate that the iPod doesn't recognize the plain MP3 files as audiobooks.
I don't expect LibriVox to encode to aac format, since they want everything to remain in the public domain. Still, it would be nice if LibriVox could get into the iTunes Music Store somehow, so that you could access audiobooks through that interface directly to your iPod or iPhone.
Tres groové. I'm too deep into my current Libravox reading to rework that one but I've got 4 others already downloaded and ready to go. I'm gonna try it out on the next one.
Nathaniel,
Could you elaborate on "crappy" and "invalid"? What do those words mean in practical terms?