Howto: Create iPod-compatible m4b audiobooks with chapters and cover

[crabman]

The text file is needed by mp4chaps which writes the chapter markers to the m4b file. Earlier versions deleted the file afterwards but before releasing i forgot to uncomment the regarding line in the code - so its a bug and its safe to delete the txt file.

Your ploblem seems to be related to gtkpod/libgpod. Maybe because you use an iphone as for iphones the libgpod development is lagging behind sometimes (the devs dont get enough free iphones to work on ). You should go to http://www.gtkpod.org/ and look for bugs or ask the developers via their mailing list. Im afraid i can cant help you with that problem, sorry.

crabman

[Asitaka]

I loaded the iPhone in rhythmbox and copied the m4b file from it to try transferring from a coworkers iTunes. iTunes threatened to wipe my iPhone since it wasn't synced with that PC so I quit, but when I checked the phone, the files had moved to a folder called audible inside the audiobooks section and all the chapters were listed. I'm not sure if it was the brief exposure to iTunes or rhythm box but your program works great for me, thanks for developing it and supporting we who mangle things

[crabman]

youre welcome!
The problem is that you use rytmbox for transferring the file you HAVE to youse gtkpod to make it work.
The ipod cannot read any metadata itself, so gtkpod/rythmbox/itunes has to extract the metadata (title, artist, chapters) and give it to the ipod seperately. As of today (afaik) gtkpod is the only program which can read and handle chapter data. All other programs (rythmbox, banshee, amarok, songbird...) will make the ipod not recognize the chapters.
Probably connecting the ipod to itunes fixed the problem.

crabman

[Asitaka]

I used gtkpod to transfer, but nothing happened until I loaded it in rythmbox and itunes.

I haven't found a solution yet, but I reckon it's because of this 'Extended info disabled' error

[tomhare]

When I unzipped m4baker I just got m4baker.py so I tried to set that up but then it said:

only the filetypes supported by soxi are supported input files. According to your sox install these are:
.8svx .aif .aifc .aiff .aiffc .al .amb .au .avi .avr .caf .cdda .cdr .cvs .cvsd .cvu .dat .dvms .f32 .f4 .f64 .f8 .fap .ffmpeg .flac .fssd .gsm .hcom .htk .ima .ircam .la .lpc .lpc10 .lu .m4a .mat .mat4 .mat5 .maud .mp2 .mp3 .mp4 .mpg .nist .ogg .paf .prc .pvf .raw .s1 .s16 .s2 .s24 .s3 .s32 .s4 .s8 .sb .sd2 .sds .sf .sl .smp .snd .sndfile .sndr .sndt .sou .sox .sph .sw .txw .u1 .u16 .u2 .u24 .u3 .u32 .u4 .u8 .ub .ul .uw .vms .voc .vorbis .vox .w64 .wav .wavpcm .wmv .wv .wve .xa .xi

any ideas?

[pearlzilla]

I'm not sure, how do I check?

[crabman]

@ tomshare: You run m4baker in CLI mode, right? seems there is something wrong with the parsing of the arguments. What was your complete command, incl args and options?

@ pearlzilla: try "apt-cahe show python-qt4" (not 100% sure because i dont have an ubuntu system around to check)

[pbasil]

Hi guys,

I think I have the same issue as tomhare

That's what happens

:~/m4baker$ ls
baseclasses.py baseclasses.pyc __init__.py m4baker.py ui

:~/m4baker$ sudo python m4baker.py install --optimize=1
Usage: m4baker.py [options] input_file1 [input_file2 ...] OR m4baker.py [options] for GUI mode

m4baker.py: error: no such option: --optimize

I am running on
:~/m4baker$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04 LTS"

Hope you can help. I can not wait to test it. It seems what I've been looking for a long while

[crabman]

try

sudo python setup.py install --optimize=1

instead of

sudo python m4baker.py install --optimize=1

and it will install correctly

the m4baker.py is the actual program while the setup.py is the installer.

crabman

[Xero Xenith]

Thank you, been looking for something like this for quite some time! A very useful tool indeed. Thank you very much