The sitation: I've got a stack of audiobooks in MP3 format in my iTunes library, and both an iPhone and an iPod Nano.
After this question, I've changed the Media Kind for the audiobook MP3s from Music to Audiobook. This has been, overall, spectacular, as now I can resume where I was, they show up under Audiobooks, etc.
On the iPhone, it's also super convenient, since the interface shows what used to be an album with multiple songs as a single book with multiple chapters, and going into "Audiobooks" presents me with a list of books, not tracks.
The Nano, on the other hand, is a little strange. After changing the media type and re-syncing the ipod, the files in question are now listed under Audiobooks rather than Music, and the extra Audiobook features are present (resume playback and so on,) but the Audiobooks menu just lists all the MP3 tracks on the iPod in alphabetical order, ignoring whichever book/album they belong to – and doesn't seem to let me browse them any other way.
This is, clearly, a little sub-optimal. Did I screw something up? How do I get the Nano to treat the files in a similar way to the way the iPhone and iTunes does – as books with chapters?
Is there a step I missed somewhere? Do I need to reformat the iPod? Is this even possible?
(Footnote: shameless bump, since this just scored me a tumbleweed.)
Best Answer
Try this thread, it's the first one I've found that's seems to be on to something:
Essentially, iPod likes it's Audioboos in one large file. This means you'll need to merge your multi-file Audiobook into one large file and convert it into the .m4b format. Ipod will then keep track of your position in the file, but if you want chapters you'll need to set those too.
Luckily we're not the only ones facing this problem and tools exist for performing both operations.
There's a Freeware tool called: Chapter and Verse that can be found on lodensoftware.com
If you're willing to pay for the privilege, there is a shareware application called: Chapter Master that will place chapters in the kind of one long file Audiobooks iPod likes.
Mind you, you'll first need to convert your MP3s to M4A or M4B. This can be done through iTunes, as well as through a freeware application called: MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter.
You'll have to Google these programs, the system won't let me post more than one link.
I hope this helps,