The problem of listening to audiobooks in the car (and a solution in the comments)
Apple Add commentsA few days ago, I bought the audiobook John Adams 
with the intention of listening to it in my car on the drive to and from Nashville to appear on Your Mac Life the week of WWDC. In total, the book is nine hours and 54 minutes long, and that’s the abridged version. I figure the drive is five hours each way, so along the whole trip, I’ll hear the entire book.
iTunes breaks the book into five parts, all except the last being a little more than two hours in length. This creates a bit of a dilemma for me. My car has a CD player, and I don’t have an audio-in jack for my iPod. Nor have I yet purchased an FM transmitter for my iPod nano. And since each audio file, except one, is longer than what can fit on a CD, I can’t burn five CDs and listen to it that way either.
In my opinion, if a music service is going to split almost ten hours of audio into multiple parts, make those parts CD burnable. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request.
Until then, I’ll be acquiring an iTrip auto for my audiobook listening pleasure.
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July 19th, 2006 at 11:21 am
They aren’t burnable? I thought Audible books were all burnable. (I used to do that before I got an iPod)
July 19th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Each audio file that makes up a segment of the book is at least two hours long. The CDs I have can hold 80 minutes of audio. The book segments are too large to be burned to CD.
July 19th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Rather than purchase the book via the iTMS, purchase it from audible.com
When I was a regular Audible member I remember burning the books to multiple CDs via iTunes.
Another suggestion is to alter the start and end times of the files via iTunes (Get Info, click on Options tab). Set the first one to end at 79 minutes and burn it, then re-set the first one to start at 79 minutes and end at 158 minutes. And so on and so forth.
July 19th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
It’s just a bit late to purchase that book from Audible. But I tried your other suggestion. I highlighted the first file from the book, pressed command-i, selected the “Options” tab, checked “Stop Time:” and set it to 79:00. The CD is burning right now.