I didn't want to go posting official feature requests without getting some other users feedback here first. It seems another feature sorely lacking in the Apple provided apps is a way to make bookmarkable and/or chapter-ized AAC files from audiobook CDs or existing files (mp3, flac, what have you).
Since Max seems to have the goal of being an audio Swiss army knife, I wanted to see if this functionality is something that would be appropriate for this app.
Right now there's no simple way to accomplish this task. Good ol' Doug has a few Applescripts that attempt to do the job, but they've been far from reliable for me. In non-developer-speak, it seems making a file bookmarkable simply involves changing the extension from m4a to m4b, but I'd have to double-check if that also marks the file with the options "Remember playback position" and "Skip when shuffling". If it's truly as simple as changing the extension, my next question would be how to change that in the new 0.6 version. I may be overlooking it, but it seems that option disappeared in the preferences.
The "Join Together" script of Doug's seems to be a bit more complicated - at least it's not an Applescript that I can open up and see the guts of (I'm obviously not a developer - can you compile Applescripts?). The functionality of it goes something like this though:
- Here's your files, are they in the correct order?
- Edit the tags for the joined track?
- Export options - bit rate, sampling rate, stereo/mono
- Set extension of joined file to m4a or m4b
- Should your joined track be "Chapterized" (using apple's "ChapterTool")
(here Quicktime pops open - just concatenates the source files and transcodes them per your settings)
Yeah - that is more complex.
The end result though (should) be a lovely thing - a whole audiobook in one file, with chapters, that won't be included in iTunes/iPod shuffle, and remembers it's place if you play something else and come back to it. Whew, that's a mouthful.I've been long-winded enough. Thoughts or comments anyone?