Mar 29

Written by: Wil Dobson
3/29/2008 4:18 PM

Over the years, I have collected nearly 75 gigs of audio books, and have very much enjoyed listening to them (some of them over and over again like Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' [unabridged]).

The trick to ripping 12+ CDs (many many more if its the NIV Dramatized Bible) and keeping your collection stable in ZUNE is your proper housekeeping of ID3 tags. Turn OFF the Zune Software option for "Automatically update album art and media information" BEFORE YOU RIP OR ORGANIZE YOUR TAGS because if you do not, your BBC Audio Drama of the Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy will have several song titles like 'So Long', 'Uncharted Backwaters', 'Panic', and the like. 

I use Mp3tag (www.mp3tag.de) to manage my album art and meta data.  With it, you can occasionally use the Tag Sources from Amazon or FreeDB to find missing information. Just in the likely event that Zune gets all crazy with it, I set my audio book files to Read Only once I get the meta data set up. 

I dont merge each CD track into a single MP3 because the 'Resume' function on the Zune player isn't available (as it is with Zune's podcasting support), so I keep them as hour-long tracks, which helps me find my place in the recording if I get interrupted (pausing works fine in most cases).

I specifically name the genre Audio Book or Audio Drama (yes, there is a difference when it comes to BBC beauties like Doctor Who). Mp3tag handles the track numbering for you, but before you rip the CD, ensure they have the same Album and Author for each CD in the collection.

If you need to, or really like to organize stuff, give each CD track a file name like '01-12_HHGTTG_Adams.mp3' (the format being [Number]-[OfTotalNumber]_[AlbumName]_[Author]). It helps to organize large numbers of them prior to having Mp3tag correct all of the track numbers from your multi-CD collection.

Copyright ©2008 Wil Dobson

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