Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Tag: sync

Audiobooks in iTunes (moving files and syncing)

I have a bunch of audiobooks that I either imported from CD or downloaded from eMusic. One problem. These audiobooks don’t show up in the audiobooks section of iTunes. Why is that important? When I sync to the iPhone, my audiobooks show up like music files and I can’t bookmark my place. Big problem.

I skip around between different books (before finishing) and don’t like to lose my place. It was such a challenge that I had been keeping note everytime I paused an audiobook with the last chapter I was listening to. There’s got to be a better way! If I could get the books into the audiobooks section of iTunes, they would automatically bookmark the last place I stopped.

Finally, I did some searching in the iTunes customer forums and found two helpful things for myself and other audiobook listeners. Here are the steps I followed to move the imported audiobooks from the music section to the audiobook section on iTunes.

1. Highlight all the files for a selected book and right click (or control-click for us Mac users). Then select “Get Info.”

get-info

2. First, changed the generic “audiobook” genre to something more specific. In this case, I chose “novel.”

genre

3. Then jump over to the “Options” tab and change file from “Music” to “Audiobook.” I also changed to yes the following: “remember position,” “skip when shuffling,” and “gapless album.”

audiobook

4. Once you click “OK,” it takes a moment for iTunes to process your files. Now they show up in “Audiobooks” instead of “Music.”

audiobook-grid

5. In order to keep from syncing all audiobooks when I sync my iPhone, I select view by list. Highlight the books I don’t want to sync, right click (control click for Mac), and choose “Uncheck selections.”

uncheck

6. Finally, I choose “Sync only checked songs and videos” under the iPhone sync screen, and I am good to go.

options1

LG-9800 Address Book

I bought the LG V last spring because I wanted to merge my Palm contacts onto a non-PDA phone. While I adapted to the PDA phones when they first came out, they didn’t really fit my usage. I use a PDA and phone in different ways and sometimes I use them at the same time, so convergence didn’t work as well for me as I had expected.

I looked for phone that could sync up with the Palm, and Verizon assured me this was the one. Well, not so simple. In fact, there is no direct sync. I bought some merge kit, which never worked. So for the past six months I haven’t taken time to mess with this and just let it slide. Yesterday, I thought I might do a little searching on the web to see who else had this problem.

Turns out the merge kit was a waste of money. I downloaded bitpim and eventually made contact with my phone (after following the instructions of a few other folks). I exported my Palm contacts to a text file. Then I imported that into Excel and created a csv file. Bitpim can import a csv file. It is supposed to import vCard files, but I was unsuccessful exporting my Palm stuff and importing via vCards.

Bitpim does seem a crash a lot (maybe I had too many contacts), but eventually I got it working. As I imported, it took me to a intermediary screen and I had to rename the columns using its pull-down menu. Until I notice that I kept clicking through that screen and getting an error. Anyway, I finally got the contacts on my phone and I am happy.

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