How to Make Tracks an Audiobook in iTunes

One of life's most frustrating experiences is when you are happily listening to your music on shuffle and all of the sudden out of your earbud someone starts talking. Then you dig your iPod or iPhone out of your pocket, double click the home button and hit skip; its annoying.

Chances are if this has happened to you its because you've downloaded an audiobook or a talk from a source other than iTunes. The music app simply sees the tracks as MP3s and plays them along with everything else, even if they are marked as the "Books & Spoken" genre, so it shuffles them in with all your songs.

Fortunately there is a simple way to fix this, its just hard to find at first. Normally I don't talk about using a computer directly here, but I only know of a fix for this via iTunes. If you know of a way to do it on iOS please Tweet to @halduauthor.

I just recently got Jon Acuff's book Quitter as a free audiobook on NoiseTrade, so we will use that as an example.

Note that I am using iTunes 11 on a MacBook, but the process is identical on older versions of iTunes or on a PC.

First find all the tracks that belong in your audiobook, this is probably most easily done by typing the book title or author name into the iTunes search bar if you downloaded it from a source like NoiseTrade or Audible.  If you ripped it off a CD hopefully you named the album and author when you did so and it should also work, if not you will have to do some digging.

It should look something like this:

Highlight all the tracks in the audiobook (click on the top one, hold shift, click on the bottom one) then do a right click, and select "Get Info" (red arrow)

You will then be asked if you want to edit multiple tracks at one time, click yes (orange box).

You will see this menu, click on "Options" on the far right (yellow arrow)

It will look like this:

In order to change these tracks into an audio book you want it to look like this:

Change Media Kind to Audiobook, this will force the tracks to show up under the Books tab in iTunes
Say yes to part of compilation.
Say yes to remember position.
Say yes to skip when shuffling (Hurray!)

There you have it, your problem is solved.  Just sync your iPhone, iPod, or iPad with iTunes and you will be good to go. If you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section below.


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