[X4U] Bulk Renaming iTunes audio book files

[Kirk McElhearn]

On Nov 23, 2009, at 3:28 PM, Mark Des Cotes wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> My local library had a "garage sale" this weekend and I picked up a bunch of old audio books on CDs. I want to import them into iTunes and put them on my iPod Shuffle. The audio book I decided to try first is made up of 7 CDs. Each CD has track 1 through whatever on it. My problem is that when I import them all I get 7 x track 1s, 7 x track 2s etc. I can select them as each CD is imported and bulk change them to Disk x of 7. But when I load them onto my iPod Shuffle the disk numbers are ignored and they end up listed by track name which puts them out of order. In this case I opened each file individually (all 117 of them) and added "CD1, CD2, CD3 etc." to the beginning of each file name. This worked for what I needed but was tedious. Is there an easier way to do this? Is there a way to select multiple files and add a prefix to their file names? It took over 40 minutes to get this one book onto my iPod and I have over a dozen more to do. Perhaps I'm overlooking something in iTunes 9.0.2? I'm still on 10.4.11 on an iMac G5 if it makes a difference.


For each CD, select all tracks, then change the album name to Book Title (CD1) or something similar. At the same time, enter the CD number in the Disc Number field.

The files will then sort correctly in iTunes.

However, when using them on the shuffle, you have to play sequentially, not in shuffle mode.

You might want to look at this article I wrote for Macworld last year:

http://www.macworld.com/article/136824/2008/11/audiobooks.html



Kirk

Kirkville -- http://www.mcelhearn.com
Writings about more than just Macs