I suspect this is just the way it is, but just in case ... ; no doubt there is much I haven’t learned about iPod.

I’ve been backing up audio books as mp3 for some years. My daughter buys stories, which are expensive. I have never had a use for the backup before now, but it seemed prudent to make them. The last couple of years, most stories have been from CD, which are generally simpler to back up than are the cassettes.

My standard file naming convention has been title, volume, track. This is especially easy to do with EAC. The title is whatever the author named the book. For CDs, the volume is A for disc 1, B for disc 2, etc. The track number is, of course, the sequential two digit numbers from the CD.

Now enter an iPod Mini and the desire to listen to the mp3 versions of what may well exceed 1000 hours of audio. The first trial reveals a major problem, which probably won’t effect all audio books, but makes the current one, and surely many others, non-functional.

The book title is too long. Upon loading onto the iPod, the title is truncated, losing the last part of the text and all three sequencing characters. The tracks are renumbered, in an exceedingly stupid, and utterly useless, way.

The CDs of this book had about 325 tracks. My final mp3 product has those all in one folder. The tracks end up on the iPod, as displayed in Windows Explorer, in thirteen folders, which are apparently pre-defined on the iPod. Each of these folders contains tracks labeled as (0)title, (1)title, (10)title, (11)title, ... (17)title, (2)title, (3)title, ..., where “title” is the truncated book title, now identical for every file as the A01, A02, A03, ... are gone. The tracks in any one of these thirteen folders are indistinguishable from those in any other folder.

When I look at what’s available from the iPod’s own menu, I see no folders. There is one list containing thirteen (0)titles followed by thirteen (1)titles, followed by thirteen (11)titles, etc. This is the order in which they play. One gets a few minutes here, a few minutes there, jumping all around through the book.

The iPod manual says very little about audio book playing other than some specialized functions available for certain downloads. If it is relevant, I used YamiPod in order to avoid iTunes.

I suppose that renaming the tracks to something short will probably avoid this problem. Perhaps those stupid numeric prefixes will not be added and everything will work OK, but this is an undesirable effort. Many of the books contain hundreds of tracks. Is there any way to make this work without renaming?

If you use iTunes or Floola you can right click mp3s and designate them as Audiobooks. Then they go in the Audiobook section of the iPod. If you give them the same album name they all show up as the same Book.

I don't know if this will help you at all, sorry.
I use this for podcasts that I can't download via rss or my own computer.

This would be useful only if it does not truncate the title and substitute its own non-functional (in this case) numbering scheme. If my title had been "Big Red" I would have no problem, but the actual title length, while no problem for Windows, is apparently too long for the iPod system. At least this is the only way I can make sense of what happens. Now, if iTunes can handle longer length names than YamiPod, that would make a difference.

I'd personally go down to try and sort them via meta tags.
Instead of precisely naming them, give them an album name of (long title). This should sort them aut and make all Ax,Bx etc display in a usable form.

*cough*
Rockbox
Why change your perfectly reasonable naming scheme for one perfectly unreasonable player?
You can remove iTunes from your chain - have perfect (for you) file-tree navigation (database view is available if you so desire) - much better bookmarking support than Apple firmware, and equal battery life now on your mini.

Rockbox is only an option for 2+ years old players, hardly an option for most of us... Also, it doesnt even nearly equate Apple firmwares native playback times.

The original question was about an iPod mini, which Rockbox works great on. Also there are more iPods out there which Rockbox does work on than those which it does not work on.

Also it does equal Apple firmware native playtimes with MP3. Your information is out of date.

Most iPods (in numbers) are new models, as the turnoverrate is extreme on these machines (3yr old are mostly either dead or tossed away for a new one). So unless you actually have managed to save your old model, it still an old model with batterytimes already slashed in half. Point being that actual machines with Rockbox will do worse than a new iPod.

1st - I remind you again that the question was specifically about an iPod Mini. Regardless of what the turnover rate is (or is not), it does not matter for the sake of this conversation.
2nd -Your claims about Rockbox are wrong. Battery life has been greatly improved since Rockbox only got half stock life on iPods. For all iPods, battery life should be equal or better than stock when playing MP3, and within 15% on other formats.


EDIT: Rereading you for the third time I now think you were not claiming Rockbox impacts battery life in a negative manner, but that any iPod which can run Rockbox is therefore old and therefore has a poor battery when compared to a new iPod.
If this is what you were suggesting - ignore point #2 and read point #1 a second time.

Doesn't happen on my iPod. My iPod will happily take longer titles/filenames than it can display on its screen (the two correspond closely)

< ... >

But I'm rather in the dark here. As I say, I think I do recall having observed iTunes truncating filenames on Windows, so that they no longer matched the track titles in the ID3 tags. But surely the device is reading the titles from the ID3 tags. How did the ID3 tags get re-written?

EDIT:

Scrub all that. I misunderstood your post. I think you're saying you can't see all the title at once, same as me on my iPod Touch, not that it's actually been truncated.

I thought the track names auto-scrolled on the older iPods (they don't on the Touch, because the interface is totally different). But it's a while since I handled one: I may be misremembering.

I'll think about your problem and repost

First off:



I don't know if it is. But unless you test with both, how can you know?

But I do think using the software that's been specially designed to work with the device would be a good place to start.



I think one has to some extent to tailor one's naming system to the software/devices that're going to be used with it. It's unfortunate that you already have a large existing catalogue before looking at the device and thinking about using it.



You wouldn't. Apple's likely the best company in the world at interface design. They're not going to use the folders/filemanager metaphor on a tiny handheld device. It works on a PC, though it's not ideal there in all situations; it'd be crazy on a DAP. What you have is an interface that is fitted to purpose and pretty much self-explanatory/easily-discoverable.

To go back to -



I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here. As I said in the earlier post, I thought the track title auto-scrolled - like a ticker - on the earlier non-multi-touch iPods. Am I misremembering? Or are we talking about the equivalent to "album title" here?

I don't understand the bit about "renumbered". And "in an exceedingly stupid, and utterly useless way" tells me nothing. Do you mean "re-ordered"? Or do you literally mean that numbers that you never put in the track title field in the ID3 tag are there to be seen in the display?

And does whatever happens also occur when you use the software that was written by the device maker?



I'd say that's a fairly unmanageable way to handle audiobooks. AFAIK, outfits like Audible that deal in audiobooks just have one file per book. Really MP4 would be better than MP3, because you can make them bookmarkable - but maybe iTunes can do that with MP3s? - and also put arbitrary content in an MP4 container. So there can be different images for different sections of a book, etc. But I wonder if you'd be better off joining those MP3s - whether or not you convert them to MP4.

The thread’s subheading is the question: is there a way to use these many thousands of file I already have (without reworking them all)? I probably don’t need to read anything from the iPod screen, so I don’t care what it says, but in fact it says the same thing I see in the YamiPod Window on the PC.

I’ve created these mp3 files over the past five or six years; none were purchased from anywhere as mp3. They started out on the computer as wav, recorded from cassettes or extracted from CDs. The backups were created with the idea of easily making new media, either cassette or audio CD, to replace anything that was lost or damaged, the purchases having been somewhat expensive.

Since we now have the iPod, it might be more convenient to use this small player and not deal with cassettes or CDs, if things can be made to work properly. I will look into this Rockbox thing and see if it seems functional.

I would never have purchased an iPod, so I would never have considered what it might need, we just happened to get a iPod mini (first generation) from someone. I might consider loading iTunes if absolutely nothing else would work, but I’m not sure that, even if that were the only way to use the device, it would be worth while to allow iTunes onto the computer. I definitely won’t load it if I can’t first determine it will make the current files useable.

I will try to make the information of my first post more clear.
The files I’ve created have no tags of any sort. They have useful names that keep them separate from other titles and sequence them. I thought I might be able to load several books at once, probably each in its own folder for convenience. Also, some of the earlier books, from before I realized I could use EAC to easily name them, are simply Track01.mp3, Track02.mp3, etc. each CD going into a separate folder (01), (02), etc., all these folders being in a folder having the book’s title.

But, in general, and in particcular with what I’ve tried

This is the title of the book A01.mp3
This is the title of the book A02.mp3
This is the title of the book A03.mp3
This is the title of the book A04.mp3
...
This is the title of the book B01.mp3
This is the title of the book B02.mp3
...

These end up as
(0)This is the title of.mp3
(1)This is the title of.mp3
(10)This is the title of.mp3
(11)This is the title of.mp3
...
(0)This is the title of.mp3
(1)This is the title of.mp3

Thus there are lots of duplicates on the iPod. I’m not sure if the above new numbering is in the original sequence or not. Within any one of these 13 folders, as seen from Windows Explorer, the titles are arranged as above, with (2) following the last (1x). On the iPod screen, thirteen (0) files are listed (and played) followed by thirteen (1) files, etc. Not at all functional.

To solve your problem (as I understand it) I would spend a few minutes writing a few lines in a script (e.g. Lua, Python, Ruby, Perl...) that renames temporary copies of the relevant files and transfers them to the ipod. Writing scripts addresses a lot of little problems of this kind on computers but whether it is wise to invest the time in learning how to use one is for you to judge. Probably no for a single task but possibly yes for several tasks in the future.

I think that's the problem. I think that explains it.

The iPod seems to work from ID3 tags (or MP4 Atoms). That way, I suppose, the user gets to scroll through his collection by Artist or Song or Album or Playlist, etc.



I suppose that either the iPod or this Yamipod, I don't know which, is populating the ID3 tags, so that the iPod can use those for presenting the information to the user. I suppose whichever is doing it is trying to guess a suitable title from the filename (and perhaps the position in this hierarchy of directories) and it's not working well.



I suppose you could enable the device for disk use, change Explorer's preferences to show "hidden" files and directories, and look how it stores them. IIRC, they're in a directory called iPod_Control. But why bother? They're not going to be in your original hierarchy, replicating the directory tree you had. I've looked in iPod_Control in the past from the point of view of interest. But, practically, it does it how it does it, and so what? Most users will be happy to let the program (iTunes) handle file naming and organization and will never even look in the program's stores. Then when they connect the iPod it transfers seamlessly for them, and it, again, presents the user with a suitable interface not with its stores. What hierarchy of directories either the PC program or the device uses, how filenames are handled, and all the rest of it are of no interest to the user - who lives in the program's interface (and the device's interface) and never need even look in the program's stores let alone manage them for himself.

If it did it any other way, it wouldn't have sold millions. I suppose there are some people who enjoy devising and constructing hierarchies of directories rather than let the program deal with all that behind the scenes. Beats me. But they'd best not buy the device. And, then again, I suppose there are occasional people in your position, who've got existing archives.

I think if I were you I might try to find a program that will populate ID3 tags by working from the filenames, but that will do it in a way you can configure, so that you can make the title read in a way that will sort correctly. Or you could do it with a script, as the last poster suggests.

I'd suggest for CDs you haven't done yet rip, encode, and tag audiobooks within iTunes. You mention not wanting to install it. I guess this is down to not wanting any extra programs you might not need and that might be invasive or something? That's not a problem for me as I'm on OS X and it's in the standard install. I suppose for you, on Windows, it might be a concern. Can't you put it on an old PC, only ever open and run it on a non-admin account, and use Windows Defender's function - called software explorer or something? - to remove anything it puts in startup?

If you like spoken content, iTunes would be worth having from the point of view of the (free) podcast section of the iTunes store alone. It's got a fantastic interface for browsing podcast content and following "people who subscribed to this also took that" type links.

For importing in iTunes, under Preferences > Import Settings I'd select:

AAC Encoder - Spoken - 32kbps (mono), 64kbps (stereo), using voice filtering

(But one could choose MP3, if preferred.) I'd put the CD in and let the CDDB populate the tags, correcting misspellings as necessary.

Import.

GetInfo on the tracks in the Music Library listing pane. On the "Options" tab change "Media Kind" from "Music" to "Audiobook" (which moves the tracks to the Audiobooks Playlist) and also check "Remember Playback Position" and "Skip when shuffling".

After synching, the tracks turn up in the "Audiobooks" section of the iPod. It's possible to listen to one for awhile and resume later, because of the "remember playback position" function.

But you don't have to import like that. Depending on the material, I'd either go with that, or I'd then highlight all the tracks before import and select Advanced > Join CD Tracks. One file per CD would be a good solution for long books. It's awhile since I've done it, but IIRC when you do that iTunes puts the Album name in the Track name slot. I think I'd leave the "Disc Number" tag empty and change the "Track Number" tag so as to call the first CD track 1, the second, track 2, and so on, putting the total number of CDs in the track total. Then I think it would sort in order, if you had more than one CD in the Audiobooks section at once and used the same name in the title field.

First I used Yamipod to remove all my audio files from the iPod.
Then I copied the .rockbox folder, with its undisturbed contents, into the root directory on the iPod disk.
Next I ran ipodpatcher.exe. This told me “no iPod found. aborted” That is as far as I’ve been able to get.

The iPod shows up as a removable disk in Windows Explorer. I can use it as a normal USB disk drive, to transport files from one computer to another. Yamipod has no difficulty with it. I found nothing on the Rockbox web site that suggested the problem I’m having.

Any ideas?

I appreciate the efforts to educate me in the apple viewpoint on iPod and the iPod interface. What was written may be completely true from many people’s viewpoint, but it isn’t my viewpoint. I have a long standing dislike of anything, software or hardware, that automates things to behave the way someone else thinks I should want them to act. I frequently disagree. I want things to be done the way I want them done rather than that I should adapt to the standard. This is definitely true for the player’s interface. This is why, as I mentioned before, I would never have purchased an iPod, there are other players without this automation. A gift horse is a gift, however.

I don't have any advice to your questions on rockbox, although i loved rockbox while i was using a compatible player.

As was mentioned above, you could convert your filenames to tags. MP3Tag does this very well, and isn't too tough to figure out. Might be worth looking into.

I find it hard to believe you did "appreciate" the attempt to understand why the system worked as it did with a view to understanding what you might, then do in your situation. But it's certainly your prerogative to be unappreciative, and also your prerogative to be unappreciative but to say you're "appreciative". Whatever pleases you.



Yes, well, I imagine most companies would rather design something that would be easy to use and would please most people. How would they know what you'd want? And, if they did, why would they want to piss everyone else off? They'd go bankrupt.



If I were you I'd stop whining like a little girl and use a program, or write a script, to populate the tags. That seems the best solution, as I and several other contributors have already said. That or sell the device on eBay and use a portable CD player.

I appreciated the effort. You seemed like a sincere and pleasant person and I didn’t want you to believe I paid no attention. Now you seem like an angry person. Is that because you see your writing work as wasted or because you feel your favorite audio player is under attack?

I’ve played with only a few other small players. Some seem clumsy to use, but some have an interface much more to my liking than Apple’s. I could copy the audio data directly. I could view exactly what I had put onto the player. Play would proceeded through everything in sequence or be only files I selected. I suppose these players, or some of them, support play lists of one sort or another, but I didn’t look into that because it doesn’t interest me. Maybe it could under some circumstances, but I have no intention of using such a device for music.

iPods are obviously very popular, so they must suit many people. To each his own.

Mp3Tag seems to do the job with little enough effort to make it feasible for my collection of many files per book. I loaded the first test book onto the iPod and listened to the first five tracks. This time they are in the proper order. Thanks for the information.

I can't say this is the approach I would prefer, but it should work fine, considering the iPod constraints.

That is because Rockbox is not a fix for Apple's shortcomings; it is a replacement for the Apple firmware.
It has true folder-tree navigation, and will display your files however you have them named (if you choose.)
That is why I recommended it.

I don't think you read my post about the problem with rockbox.

Yea, I misread your later post.
Why did you not use RBUtil to do an automatic install as outlined in the manual?
Regardless, ipodpatcher should work. Are you running it with admin privileges? It needs them for working on the firmware partition.


Is it really a (black and white screen) Mini? Or is it a 2nd generation Nano (thinner, colour screen)? Many people confuse the two product names.

I never do an automatic install of anything if there is any possibility of doing it otherwise. Besides, when I first downloaded the software, I had no reason to expect problems. The manual .rockbox install is very simple and went without difficulty. Ipodpatcher is a separate step. Ipodpatcher probably “should” be able to work, but it can’t locate the iPod, even though the system views and operates on it without problem through Windows Explorer and other software recognizes it.

There are no admin privileges in Win98.

It is a black and white generation 1.

The autoinstall is the supported install.
That being said, pre Win2K is a known no-go.

While using the iPod with my backup mp3 files, after applying tags with Mp3tag, is generally fairly satisfactory, there is a problem of getting going again after stopping under some conditions. In general, I just press on stop a few seconds to turn off the device. When I turn it back on the next day, it starts up where it left off.

However, the battery needs to be charged every two or three days, via USB. So far, I have been unable to figure out any method that does not result in things being reset. When the device is detached from the USB cable, it is always on, on the menu. The only way I can get back to where I want to be is to scroll down to Songs, then scroll through hundreds of files until I find where I was. The tiny screen only displays the first part of the title in its list, identical for every file, which makes it even more tedious.

The downloaded manual says book marking is only available for special files purchased from several sources. Since all ours are home made from the purchased cassettes or CDs, they don’t seem to qualify. Is there some way to make finding where things left off before battery charging more convenient?

The charge seems to last two to three hours. The manual gives no hint, that I have found, about how long might be normal, but I suspect the battery is not working especially well. Anyone know what is good for a first generation iPod mini?

8 Hours when new.