iPodject

Last school year, I told our Student Council we’d be working on getting iPod Shuffles for the LRC to checkout with our minimal audiobook collection.  However, the lack of LCD screen to guide a reader is as irritating as the file format issues (an audiobook in iTunes needs to be an .m4b file).

Other schools in my district are using the Creative Zen and other MP3 players which have a bookmarking feature.  While I am interested in this, I have already invested lots of time and money getting audiobooks onto iTunes and synced up with our iPod Classics.  Unfortunately, the remaining host of audiobooks on CD have sat in a bag waiting for “time” (I don’t have) to change them over.

An early December post from CNet, however, gave me new hope!  Taking an audiobook from CD to iPod is now quite easy with iTunes 8.  Using their photo guidance I practiced with personal copies of Shel Silverstein audio CDs that came with books and I was up and running in minutes!  As a result, my wife transferred all of my daughter’s audiobook CDs onto her old iPod Mini this morning.

iTunes/iPod can Bookmark…sort of

While the bookmarking feature is useful and one Apple should integrate, there are many benefits to using audiobooks with iTunes:

• Audiobooks are automatically bookmarked: if you stop an audiobook in the middle and play something else, then go back to the audiobook, it will start playing where you left off – even after resynchronizing your iPod.
• The main menu has a direct Audiobooks entry.
• You can play audiobooks faster or slower than normal speed.
• Audiobooks can have chapter stops within them.
• Audiobooks are automatically skipped during all music shuffle.

(These ideas and direct quotes taken from Ed’s Tech Tips)

Recommendations

Regardless of what route you take, I think the following are useful ideas:

1. IF you’re using an MP3 player with a simple LCD screen, it can be helpful to label your tracks with information about the book: title acronym, series number (if applicable), chapter number, and chapter title/description (e.g. Ranger’s Apprentice, Book One: The Ruins of Gorland by John Flanagan = RA_bk1-ch00-Prologue).
2. If you’re using a video capable MP3 player, I’d add “artwork” for the cover of the book.
3. If a chapter is several tracks long, you might want to combine the tracks into one file.  This requires another program to manage, but in iTunes, you can highlight the tracks then choose Advanced menu → Join Tracks

Enjoy!

I’ve been working diligently in my spare time to get the iPodject Companion Site up and running, get teachers and students interested in using the iPods, and setting up a web log of the process. While I sometimes wonder if this blogging thing is really worth investing any of my precious time (2-6 AM this morning, unfortunately), I do see a benefit in sharing my progress for other educators experimenting with iPods in education. I can thank my online communications with Tony Vincent of Learning in Hand and Mark van ‘t Hooft of ISTE’s Handheld Special Interest Group for that.

Currently I’m working on actually getting the audiobooks onto my external hard drive. I’ve continually run into problems with iTunes defaulting back to my C Drive rather then the external drive. After a post on the Educational Technology Listserv Ed-Tech, Dan Craig replied with this:

“It’s kind of a pain, but I’ve been going through this since getting my first iPod. I’ve never wanted to store my collection on my laptop’s HD, so it’s on an external HD.

I do this with a PC, but I’m assuming it’s similar (if not the same) on a Mac.

1) Map the drive so you get the same drive letter each time you connect.
2) Open the iTunes Music Library.xml file in a text editor (in your iTunes folder)(it’s a good idea to save a backup version at this point).
3) Use find and replace to replace the current path (your C: drive) to the external drive. Just replace everything before the iTunes folder name.
4) Sometimes I have to restart iTunes to get it to load right. I’ve also had to clear the library in the past in re-import it (save a copy of the iTunes Music Library.xml file in another location prior to doing this).

Like I said, it’s a pain, but it doesn’t take that long to do.

Daniel A. Craig
English Instructor
Seoul National University
Foreign Language Education Center, Yongon Campus”

I truly appreciate this and I will give it a chance when I get back to my school this week. Of course I need to figure out how to “map a drive” since my district technical support analysts have done this previously.