Audiobook Maker

As someone who is sick of listening to the same music over and over again and less knowledgeable on literature then they would like to be, I’ve found myself gravitating to audio books as of late. I listen to them on my commute and on longer road trips and I must attest that they really help pass the time.

Rather then just listening to them as a ton of mp3’s though, iTunes and iPods have some cool functionality for playing back .m4b files which it identifies as audio books. These files can have chapters, variable playback speed, and bookmark your location to remember where you leave off. The question though, is how to convert a bunch of mp3’s that you already have into this format to enable the playback benefits. I did some searching and found MP3 to iPod Audiobook Converter to be an excellent tool on Windows. This suited me for a while, but I wanted chapters and something for OSX so I found Audiobook Builder, which unfortunately isn’t free.

Audiobook Maker, however, is the best of both worlds: chapters, OSX, and FREE! The development hasn’t updated since 2005, so I recently chose to pickup the reins of the project. I’ve got a few features and fixes ready to release, but I’d love to get more users on this app and get even more feedback, feature requests, etc. One caveat though is that I’m not very good at cocoa programming, so if someone would like to volunteer their services to work on the program with me I’d appreciate it. So if you are and audio book listener try out the app and see if you like it, and if you are a developer that would like to work on the app (especially if you know cocoa) then drop me a line.

UPDATE: I’ve since relinquished development of Audiobook Maker to another developer, nothing is wrong with it I just didn’t have time for it anymore.  For those seeking another alternative when creating audiobook files I also recommend Join Together by Doug Adams.  It’s a great little app and does all the work of taking MP3s out of iTunes, converting, and putting the resulting file in your library.