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Author Topic: Help with audiobook / m4b encoding  (Read 1233 times)

Hoegaardener70

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Help with audiobook / m4b encoding
« on: August 17, 2018, 01:19:04 pm »

Hi there, I am new to MC 24 and love it so far for audiophile use. However, I am struggling with my rather large audiobook library. Things on many devices got out of hand since my older ripped Audio CDs (not available any more) sometimes had 30 or more tracks on them... that could lead to hundreds of files for one novel alone! I am trying now to combine these files to m4b files. MC 24 would be the best option but sadly, there seems to be no option for encoding mp3 to m4b. Would anybody know if I could may be use an external encoder? Or any other ideas?

I am clearly at a loss. I only know of two windows programs encoding m4b, and they are very old and super inconvenient / slow (ACC audiobook and chapter & verse, and both do not even accept the mp3 because of quicktime issues)..... Or is there the possibility for a way to merge mp3 in the media center?

Thanks for your help!!!
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RD James

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Re: Help with audiobook / m4b encoding
« Reply #1 on: August 17, 2018, 02:15:07 pm »

It seems like this is one of those situations where it might be best if you explain what you are trying to do.
Are you simply trying to make things easier to manage by joining a lot of MP3 tracks together into a single file, or is there a reason that you want to convert to M4B?
It's generally recommended that you do not re-encode lossy audio formats such as MP3.
 
If all you want is to join the tracks together, mp3DirectCut's batch processing should do that as quickly as your HDD can read the files, since it does not re-encode them.
But that won't do things like generate chapters for the book.
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swiv3d

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Re: Help with audiobook / m4b encoding
« Reply #2 on: August 17, 2018, 05:22:57 pm »

Take a look at this page it might help.
https://www.lifewire.com/m4b-file-2621958
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Hoegaardener70

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Re: Help with audiobook / m4b encoding
« Reply #3 on: August 20, 2018, 10:16:54 pm »

It seems like this is one of those situations where it might be best if you explain what you are trying to do.
Are you simply trying to make things easier to manage by joining a lot of MP3 tracks together into a single file, or is there a reason that you want to convert to M4B?
It's generally recommended that you do not re-encode lossy audio formats such as MP3.
 
If all you want is to join the tracks together, mp3DirectCut's batch processing should do that as quickly as your HDD can read the files, since it does not re-encode them.
But that won't do things like generate chapters for the book.

Many thanks for the useful link. To answer the question, I do listen a lot to audio books so having chapters is a useful function. However, joining tracks would be a valid workaround.

After some trying out with programs, I decided to convert my library to .mb4. It is painful but it is also a chance to select and tag my messy library. Joining the tracks can have unpleasant results as well, I read, for audiobooks.

Could you please quickly comment how bad you think the loss in quality will be as a consequence of the re-encoding?
 
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Hoegaardener70

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Re: Help with audiobook / m4b encoding
« Reply #4 on: August 20, 2018, 10:19:16 pm »

Take a look at this page it might help.
https://www.lifewire.com/m4b-file-2621958

Many thanks for your help, one of the linked programs is working well on windows. However, I will do the bulk on my Mac since the program Chaptermark automatically takes over author and book title from my .mp3 files.
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