iTunes Tip: Make your own Audiobook by Seth

Filed under: Tech

iTunes is a Swiss army knife of media, allowing you to manage all kinds of media, from music to movies, with TV shows, podcasts and music videos in between, but it also has a feature that isn’t immediately apparent to some users.

It is excellent for audiobooks. Today, I happened to chance upon some free ebooks online, but I don’t have time to read nowadays, and while surfing a few web pages on the iPhone is fine and all, trying to read an entire book on it will kill your eyes. Thus, I Googled a bit and found an easy solution to convert them into Audiobooks so that I can listen to the books on the go.

First, you must be on 10.5. That’s OS X Leopard, the latest Mac operating system. I’m not sure if this will work on Tiger, because Leopard features an updated Automator, and a new computer voice, Alex, which is much more coherent than the old voices. First, fire up Automator, and put the following workflow items:

1. Get Contents of TextEdit Document
2. Text to Audio
3. Save it as a plug-in and give it a suitable name, say “Make Audiobook”

Copy all your text from the ebook and paste it into a new TextEdit document, and save it:

(Yes, it is Animorphs. Love the series.)

With the text file open, right-click on the text file, go to More > Automator > Make Audiobook:

25,000 words took about 10 minutes to convert on my MacBook Pro, and you could possibly use Automator to automate the entire process of converting an entire folder of ebooks. The end result was a 3.5 hours audio file which was 500MB. I managed to get it down to 50MB by converting it to a lower bitrate, which is of acceptable quality since it’s just spoken text. I might have to experiment with the converting process a bit to see if I can scale down the length and file size. In any case, the iPhone/iPod comes with the ability of setting an increased speed at which audiobooks are spoken, so it wouldn’t take as long as 3.5 hours to be read.

Also remember to set it as an Audiobook within iTunes, and check “Remember playback position” so you will pick up where you last left off. You can also embed the book cover on the Audiobook if you have the image. If you want, you can also add chapters to the Audiobook (although this requires another tutorial on its own).

I think this is quite an interesting and exciting feature of iTunes and Apple’s music players. You can convert other stuff like notes and maybe online news articles. When you’re as lazy as me, making reading a passive thing to do on a train is excellent.

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