Can I separate audiobooks and music?

[ClutchFan]

Hi all, I just got my first android device yesterday (galaxy s3 mini) after having used a dumbphone and ipod for ages.

So far I have everything set up fine, I used doubleTwist to sync all my iTunes music with android (basically it just copied everything over to the android, which I could have done myself but whatever).

But one huge problem is that my audiobooks are combined with my music, and so far no app I've tried (amazon mp3 player, google play, and whatever the built-in music app is) can correctly separate them.

A related problem is that doubleTwist copied ALL of my books. I have my iTunes set up to only sync checked music and books, so when I'm done with a book I uncheck it, that way I don't have to sift through a million books to find the one I want to listen to. But doubleTwist didn't seem to know how to obey that setting. So now it'll be a PITA to find a single book, plus since I have a lot of books it makes it impossible to shuffle songs without hitting a random chapter from a book.

I've read a few dozen forum threads about this and none of the solutions work for me, such as hiding the audiobooks folder by preceding it with a . in the name. That might work but then how would I find my books when I do want to listen to them? and it wouldn't allow me to keep using iTunes, which I'd like to do since it's always done a great job of solving the above problems.

Anyway, has anyone found a good solution for this? Right now I'm thinking I might just stop putting audiobooks in iTunes. Then I can allow doubleTwist to always sync my music library. Meanwhile I'll just manually copy over the books I want to listen to, and I'll put them somewhere completely different. Then I'll try to set up one app to only look in the books folder, and another app to only look in the music folder.

 

[Rukbat]

But one huge problem is that my audiobooks are combined with my music, and so far no app I've tried (amazon mp3 player, google play, and whatever the built-in music app is) can correctly separate them.

Any file manager (ES File Explorer, Total Commander) can. To Andrid, the only difference between an audio book and a music file is what you use it for - they're both just audio files, so no app is going to see a difference between them. YOU separate them by the difference they make to YOU.

A related problem is that doubleTwist copied ALL of my books. I have my iTunes set up to only sync checked music and books, so when I'm done with a book I uncheck it, that way I don't have to sift through a million books to find the one I want to listen to. But doubleTwist didn't seem to know how to obey that setting.

That's a setting in iTunes, not in DT. DT "obeys" DT settings, not settings in other programs.

So now it'll be a PITA to find a single book, plus since I have a lot of books it makes it impossible to shuffle songs without hitting a random chapter from a book.

If you don't want your books scanned (seen by media programs during scan), put a .nomedia file in their folders. You can still manually look in those folders for books.

and it wouldn't allow me to keep using iTunes, which I'd like to do since it's always done a great job of solving the above problems.

It may do a great job with iPhones, but it wasn't written to do a great job with Android phones, and it doesn't.

Anyway, has anyone found a good solution for this? Right now I'm thinking I might just stop putting audiobooks in iTunes. Then I can allow doubleTwist to always sync my music library. Meanwhile I'll just manually copy over the books I want to listen to, and I'll put them somewhere completely different. Then I'll try to set up one app to only look in the books folder, and another app to only look in the music folder.

Since an audio file is an audio file to Android (whether it's a symphony or someone reading a book) that would be one way of doing it. You're expecting Android to recognize the difference between two things that, to Android, aren't different. And that's not going to work. They mean something different to YOU, so YOU'RE going to have to separate them.

 

[ClutchFan]

My idea of separating them is how I do it in iTunes, I mark them as audiobooks (in the software) and the software knows to ignore them while shuffling. Physically (on the drive) they can be mixed together or separate, doesn't matter to me.

Anyway so if I put a .nomedia file in the audiobook folder, how do I play an audiobook through the android? Won't amazon, google, etc all ignore that folder completely?

 

[mikedt]

My idea of separating them is how I do it in iTunes, I mark them as audiobooks (in the software) and the software knows to ignore them while shuffling. Physically (on the drive) they can be mixed together or separate, doesn't matter to me.

Anyway so if I put a .nomedia file in the audiobook folder, how do I play an audiobook through the android? Won't amazon, google, etc all ignore that folder completely?

Presumably you've got your audiobook MP3s in their own folder called "audiobooks" or something. You'll be able to play them directly from the file explorer. The idea of .nomedia is to prevent non-music MP3s showing up in music player apps like Amazon or Google. Some specific audiobook apps have their own ways of organising their own proprietary DRM'd audiobook files, e.g. Audible. But a general MP3 player can't really discriminate between what is an audiobook MP3 and a music MP3.

iTunes has its own way handling audiobooks, which only works with Apple devices.

 

[ClutchFan]

iTunes has its own way handling audiobooks, which only works with Apple devices.

I understand that, I was hoping that by now there'd be a similar capability for androids. I did manage to come up with a decent solution, not as good as iTunes and my iPod but close enough. For anyone who reads this in the future, here's what I did.

1. I purchased iSyncr for $3.99 to sync my iTunes library. I tried a few free apps but none of them did what I wanted, mainly two things: iSyncr obeyed the iTunes setting for "sync only checked songs", and it obeyed the option to sync only the genres I chose. Since I excluded "audiobooks" and "books and spoken", it skipped over all of my books.

2. Now I have all my music on android, great, but no books. I can use any music player app to play my music. I chose rocket player (free version) because it also displays my ratings from iTunes.

3. I installed akimbo, a free audiobook player app, and pointed it to a separate folder I created on my sd card (while the android was connected through USB). I manually copied the audiobooks I'm currently listening to into that folder

4. Akimbo won't play (for me at least) audiobooks from audible. That's fine, audible has it's own app, so I installed that for audible books.

So I have three apps for listening - one for music, and two for audiobooks. Again this isn't as good as the simple setting in iTunes to ignore audiobooks when shuffling, and to sync only checked songs (so I don't fill up my device with a massive audiobook library) but so far it seems to be as good as it gets.

 

[tedg65]

Does Akimbo bookmark your audio file so that you can pick up where you left off whenever you want?.......that's what I need......all my players seem to return to 0.00 in the chapter if I close the file.......frustrating!

 

[tedg65]

Looks like Akimbo solved my issues----tx!!!!!

 

[Umnik192]

Want to add my two cents.
You did a good way. Also want to advise you Astro Player. You can place all your audiobooks in one folder and in Astro Player you can make this folder as a default one so that when you open it, you can see the folders with audiobooks only. And it has more features for audiobooks like bookmarks, playback speed adjustment for faster listening, etc.

 

[AspTower]

I was looking for something that could stop "Android Players" (when in shuffle mode), from playing my Audio-books too.
I would have thought that decent ideas from one system (like iTunes being able to ignore Audio-books during shuffle mode), would be added to programs on another system (Android Media Players, or Windows without installing iTunes itself on) by someone that programs those media players, and visa versa?
I am amazed that nobody has done so yet. First one to do it will probably make a fortune as all the people looking for that to happen will transfer to that media player even if it cost a few quid to buy, rather than being free like iTunes and other such players on Android and Windows. iTunes must be looking at the files themselves to do it's sorting by looking at the metadata and noticing that some are Audio-books and others are not. I'm no programmer but there must be a way to make Android Players look at the same data and do that too?