Homegrown Audio Books 

While Audible.com is a wonderful service and provides audiobooks to the iTunes store, you can burn your own audiobooks that behave the exact same way, but sound a lot better. It's legal. If you own a CD it's within your rights of fair use to change it to another format.

It takes a little work, but audiobook connoisseurs prefer to burn their own as opposed to buy those tinny, scratchy tracks from Audible. This is how to do it on a Mac. If someone has a Windows method, feel free to comment below.

There are two apps you need. They're donationware from Doug's Applescripts. One is Make Bookmarkable. This give your AAC track an M4B extension that gets iTunes to treat it like an audiobook.

The other is Join Together. This combines multiple burned CDs into one track for easier management. Put Make Bookmarkable in UserName/Library/iTunes/Scripts on your desktop. Join Together can be dragged to your Applications folder.

• Open iTunes.
• From the menu go to iTunes>
• Preferences>Advanced>Importing>Import>Using: AAC Encoder>Setting: Spoken Podcast.
• Click OK.
• Insert your CD. If you're net connected, the CD name and track titles will probably appear.
• Click on any track.
• Press Apple-A to highlight all.
• From the Advanced menu choose Join CD Tracks.
• Click on the first track.
• From the Advanced menu>Convert Selection to AAC.
• Repeat this section of steps for each CD.
• When done burning all CDs, highlight all tracks in your Library list.
• Click on the Applescript menu between Window and Help and choose Make Bookmarkable.
• OK the notice and your files disappear.
• You'll now find them in Audiobooks.
• Double click on Join Together.
• Choose 5 bookmarked tracks max.
• Add title and artist info.
• Check the Passthrough box.
• Click Proceed.
• Repeat this section with any remaining tracks.

You now have audiobooks of pristine quality that will show up in the Audiobooks list of your iPhone. If you have a set of 10 CDs you now have them on just two tracks. If you join more than 5 CDs, the track takes a long time to start and may crash the iPod on your iPhone.

Incidentally, Doug is quite a generous individual who has been giving away his useful Applescripts for a very long time. It's tragically ironic that he should fall victim to a horrid tropical disease on Bali in the midst of his monumental effort to single-handedly teach the Third World to code. Click here and give until it hurts to help this brave young man cure his chronic Lackamoola. Thank you.