Hi Jane, There's no simple was to move serialized audio books that you get as podcast subscriptions to the Audiobooks section of your iTunes library. In order to be located in the Audiobooks section, the file format must either be AAC (e.g., typically with file extension types of .m4a or .m4b, but other destinations which are audio-only parts of movies might be recognized, too) or Audible's .aa file type. You can find out the file type by using Get Info (Command+i) on any selected track in the Songs Outline, and check the Summary page listing for Kind. Typical entries will be "Kind: MPEG audio file". A few of your podcasts might be "Kind: AAC audio file" but most serialized audio books will be MP3 (MPEG audio file) format. So if they're MP3 files, you can't get them into the Audiobooks section without first doing a file conversion to change them to AAC, which will also degrade their quality.
The other thing that distinguishes podcasts that you subscribe to via iTunes is that iTunes writes additional information into the file. This includes a keyword "PCST" that identifies it as a podcast, information on the feed URL, and a few other things. If that information is stripped out, then the track is treated like a music file. For MP3 files, one way to strip out the PCST information is to select a file and use "Convert ID3 tags" under the Advanced Menu on the iTunes menu bar, Check the check box for ID3 tag version, and interact with the popup button to set this to "None". This strips out all tagging information for the track, including artwork, artist, etc., so it's not recommended. Supposedly, you can use a program called Atomic Parsley from the terminal in command-line to change these arguments. Someone posted a hint to Mac OS X hints last October on how to do this. Again, this doesn't help you with audiobooks if the files are not in AAC format. So your only option would be to convert a podcast mp3 file to AAC format (and suffer some quality loss) and then use the MakeBookmarkable AppleScript to put these into your Audiobooks library. It may not be worthwhile. Cheers, Esther On Feb 01, 2008, at 10:29AM, Jane Jordan wrote: >I downloaded a couple of serialized audio books from podcast feeds. I >want to see them in the audio books section of the library. Can I do >this and still continue to receive fresh content as it becomes >available? If so, what do I need to do? > >Jane > > >
