BUILD A LOCAL AUDIOBOOK LIBRARY

Having brought all your audiobooks together, now all you need to do is play them. If you only plan to listen to them on your PC, both iTunes and MusicBee (https://getmusicbee.com) offer dedicated audiobook views, enabling you to not just split your audiobooks from your music files, but also take advantage of specific audiobook features, such as the ability to pick up from where you left off during playback.

If you plan to go down the iTunes route, we recommend moving the Audiobooks folder back inside the default iTunes Media\Music folder. After being added to your iTunes library, you’ll find them automatically classified as music. You can move them across by right-clicking a title (or titles) and choosing “Get Info > Options tab.” From here, change its “Kind” to “Audiobook.” It then vanishes from the Music library (switch to Audiobooks view to get it back). Sadly, the way iTunes works is to sort the audiobook library by title, so multiple entries for each audiobook will appear. To fix this, download the AudiobookSortName script from http://samsoft. org.uk/iTunes/scripts.asp

– once done, select all your audiobooks in iTunes, then double-click the script. Click “Yes,” and wait for a minute or so for it to perform the sort silently in the background. If your security software protests, you should either allow the script to run, or temporarily create an exception for C:\ Windows\System32\wscript. exe.

MusicBee also has a dedicated audiobooks view – after adding your audiobook folder to the library, you need to right-click each author or narrator in turn, and then choose “Send to > Audiobooks” to transfer them to MusicBee’s Audiobooks view. The primary advantage of doing this is that MusicBee will remember where you stopped listening to an audiobook, and then pick up from where you left off the next time you open it.