This is Not a Brain Surgery

11:14 am - Importing audio books into iTunes

I have worked out a procedure to import audio books into iTunes. Below you will find a link to Automator script which automates the following steps:

1. Convert files to AAC: some older iPods could not remember playback position in MP3 files. For new ones you may want to use this step anyway to adjust bit rate to save space. I am using following import settings in my iTunes:



2. Adjust volume by 30%. Some books are just not loud enough and I could not crank volume any more in my car. So as precaution I always adjust a volume by 30% - it always possible to bring it down while listening.

3. Pre-set equalizer to "Spoken Word"

4. Set options song: "Remember Playback Position" and "Skip When Shuffling". Unset options "Part of a Gapless Album" and "Part of a Compilation".

5. Set Genre to "Audiobooks"

I am using these steps for few years now and very happy with results. Additionally, if your chapter names have numbers at the beggning (e.g. "01. Intrduction", "02. First Chapter") you may want to use this iTunes script to conver them to track numbers.

Now, as promised, an Automator workflow which performs steps 1-5 on a collection of audio files selected in Finder and adds them to iTunes as a new Playlist, called "New Audio Book". Download "Import Audio Book.workflow.zip" and unzip it into "~/Documents/Workflows". Now you can select files, start Automator and run this workflow. Alternatively, you can open it in Automator, choose "Save As Plug-In" menu and select "Finder Plugin" format. After that you can right click on selected files in Finder and select "More->Automator->Import Audio Book" to run this workflow on selected files.

03:52 pm - new Itunes RSS extensions

There is new iTunes RSS2 module definition from Apple which says:

<enclosure>
The file extension of the url attribute of this tag is used to determine if an item should appear in the Podcast directory. Supported extensions include "m4a", "mp3", "mov", "mp4", and "pdf".

08:37 pm - iTunes podcasting support

Unless you have not heard already, today new version of Apple iTunes have been released which supports podcasting. This is very exiting news for podcasting community, for their technology making a real break to surface, becoming mainstream. My colleagues and I was testing iTunes podcasting support and here are our first observations:

Good:

* Nice UI
* Option to download only last episode
* Options how many podcasts to keep
* Supports HTTP authentication on podcast download

Bad:

* Adding podcast not listed in Apple directory is not obvious: you have too look up the menu item under "Advanced" menu
* All settings are global - no per-podcast settings
* Display of item description is in non obvious place ("i" icon which in my case was scrolled past right window margin)
* When displaying podcast information, HTML is stripped. For example you can not put link there
* LINK element in Item is ignored - there is no way to open or even see to this link
* Items without enclosure tag are simply not shown. So if you have occasinal text-only item in your podcast - your readers/listeners will never see it.


To be tested:

* I have not checked if iTunes must be running in order to be able to update podcasts. I hope they do not have to.
* Still needs to be checked if they use HTTP conditional GET when fetching podcasts. It is criminal not to.

My main problem is missing links. Adam Curry's concept of podcast "show notes" won't work anymore! You can't easily put some links to resources associated with particular podcast where users can easily access them.

Decision not to show text items is dissapointing, like not permitting text in picture books. Instead of going in directions of reach text/video/audio/hyperlinks media with RSS subscriptin functionality we go back to separate photo (iPhoto RSS?), audio/video (iTunes RSS), text (Safari RSS) aggregators.

As to Apple RSS extensions, many people wrote already about them. For example Edd Dumbill published good analysis (found via Danny Ayers blog). I personally especially surprised by their decision not to use standard RSS 2 "category" element, which have "domain" attribute specifically to specify taxonomy namespace. Not using Dublin Core is also kind of ignorant.

Hopefully they would listen to what people are saying and fix things soon.