Make audiobook for kindle

[arad26]

I have a question for you guys! I downloaded a few audiobooks but they are multiple mp3 files! Is there a way to join them and chapterize it, and to show up on the kindle the same way as an audible audiobook show up ,with pictures , and chapters....is this possible???

[stephenwilks]

This is my experience with K3.

I downloaded a Thomas Hardy novel - A Laodicean - from Project Gutenberg and then a series of chapter MP3s for it from Librivox. I put the MP3s in the Music folder so that they could be played with the usual simple commands. The files had obviously been processed with a view to their being played by a machine/program in succession, since the rudimentary MP3 player played them in exactly the right order to accompany my reading of the book. It was easy to read at the same pace as the soundtrack, with just a few pauses to the soundtrack to allow the checking of dictionary entries. When one chapter finished, the next one started automatically.

There is one drawback. If you break off halfway through a chapter and let the Kindle drift off asleep for the night, the chapter soundfile seems to default back to the beginning of the chapter you were in. So you tend to read one chapter at a time, or allow the audio to give you a quick recap the following day.

Interestingly, the narrator occasionally seemed to be following a slightly different version of the book. These could have been misread, but they still seemed logical in most cases. So much so, that it wasn't clear whether the Gutenberg or the Librivox version was the most accurate. And it was only a very small handful of words that were different.

An Irish reader of a Hardy novel was definitely a new and interesting slant on things! ;-) A few of the pronunciations also gave (positive) pause for thought. All in all, I found such a spendthrift 'audiobook' to be a very worthwhile exercise.

By the way. I have a suspicion that it is OK to put the MP3s straight into the Music folder without unzipping them first. I was informed some place that you can do this with photographs on a Kindle, and it certainly worked when I tried it. See if it also works with MP3 files! If it doesn't, you can always unpack them into the Music folder.

Some perhaps rather obvious advice. Don't contaminate the folder with real music MP3s or files from other books, as that really could upset the play order or mean that you have to wade through other material before the appropriate soundtrack can be found. And from the point of view of Kindle's limited capacity alone, it is probably best to only store one MP3 'audiobook' in the Music folder at any time. It's dead easy, however, to remove the soundfiles and back them up on a PC or laptop when the read is over.

With longer (radio program, non-music or book) podcasts, I tend to put them in the Document folder to play individually. Obviously, you can't then listen to them at the same time as reading something else - but their subject matter usually requires greater concentration anyway. That also means that you get to use the same audiobook player that the Audible books play on. And whereas the available commands are still a bit limited, you do have just a bit more control than you do with MP3s in the Music folder.

Don't put your home-made 'audiobook' MP3s in the Document folder, as they will definitely not link together at all there. But of course, you can't then read text simultaneously anyway.

[Synamon]

nevermind