Audiobook organizer

[pwalker8]

I'm looking for a way to organize my audiobooks. Right now, they are all in iTunes on my mac, but that has a number of limitations. There is no place to put in series information. Plus, I would like to better track which audiobooks I've actually listened to. The biggest limitation is all that because of the way Apple does audiobooks, that information doesn't make it down to the iPhone/iPad. Ideally, it would be something like calibre, but calibre doesn't really handle audiobooks well.

Right now, I exported the audiobook info from iTunes and imported it into a Bento database, which works pretty well. I do have to manually add new entries, but I rarely buy more than 5 or 10 over the space of a month. Plus, it syncs down to my iPad.

Unfortunately, support for Bento was dropped by Filemaker and I have no desire to spend $500 for Filemaker Pro. I've played around with Numbers, and it works ok, but a database will allow me to filter it better.

Anyone have an solutions that they use?

[badgoodDeb]

Some people do create a Calibre library for this (I started, but didn't take it very far). You can create all the columns that you desire ..... and when you drop the audio book into Calibre, drop it as a zipped item. Calibre won't cope with an audiofile anyway (as I recall), so drop a zipped file into the library, to keep all the pieces together.

You may want fields for "how many segments" "how long is it (running time)", etc. There is a thread about this here, somewhere ....

Here are two such threads:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=278904
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=114597

[ATDrake]

In terms of current Mac-compatible database software which some website reviews have said works in a Bento-like fashion, Records is pretty decent, and you can import/export CSV and arrange a whole bunch of custom field displays to your liking, and create templates from them. It shows up in Mac software bundle offers every so often for considerably lower than the usual asking price, and you can download a 14-day trial off the website. The storage format is non-proprietary, and each one you create is just simple text in an SQLite database in a folder with a couple of other metadata files, which you can easily backup/copy/share.

I got in a bundle a while back and used to use it for keeping track of my soundtrack CD collection before I just went and started keeping everything in a pseudo-YAML format via TaskPaper* because that allowed for greater flexibility in specifying exact contents as-is, rather than having to come up with a standard set of fields to fill out and accounting for variability in advance. Maybe one day I'll export to CSV and import everything back into Records to have a nice-looking visually-browseable copy.

iDatabase is pretty similar (though IMHO doesn't have as nice an interface) and I tried a trial of it when I was looking at the developer's website to check out the overall quality of their software to see if I wanted to get a couple of other things of theirs which are currently being offered in a bundle deal I'm considering. The trial is 30 days, and there's an iOS version which you can apparently sync via DropBox and use for on-the-go record browsing/updating, if that's a consideration.

The display in iDatabase is not nearly as flexibly customizable as Records (it seems like you're limited to having everything appear in some kind of default layout, though you can specify fonts and such), but otherwise it works in much the same way and seemed pretty easy to use. Export was a little more non-obvious; it turns out you have to select a database and Ctrl-click to bring up a contextual menu to see the CSV option, rather than using the main file menus. On the plus side, there is a specific tutorial on importing Bento databases over at the official support site. Again, the storage format seems to be just plain text within SQLite.

Both Records and iDatabase come with a bunch of pre-loaded templates for common stuff like movies and cds. And both of them could use better documentation for their features and how-tos, although there are some faqs on their respective websites (the iDatabase one is not actually on their website, but on a different support site which for some reason they don't link from their main) for the important usage cases, and it's easy enough to find out what the features do by playing around a bit.

Some reviews with better descriptions and screenshots (ETA: some of these were written some time ago, and several missing features have since been added to their respective apps):

• Records @ Lifewire.com
• Records @ Mac Sources
• Records @ some guy's personal blog
• iDatabase @ Macworld, specifically in terms of Bento replacement comparisons

* Which I should note, is not a usage recommendation, since I'm re-purposing that for something it was never actually intended for.

Although it is a pretty good application otherwise, with the ability to fold and hide items one doesn't want to see/edit at the moment and focus on the items one does, and drag and drop rearrangement of folded nodes, with multiple views to compare stuff. Plus a lot of user-contributed scripts and stylesheets, for which you can write your own.

And it has excellent search/tag filters which you can write pretty specifically and save for reuse, if that matters.

I also have DEVONthink Personal, which I got in yet another bundle, which TBH is probably overkill, but has this cool feature where it can create a virtual index of the contents of your external hard drives, which you can then browse and search through like you were using Spotlight and the Finder.

[silverraven]

http://www.collectorz.com/book/
I always thought this looked pretty cool. I have no idea if it would do all you need though.
S

[pwalker8]

Thanks for the info. I'll give Records and iDatabase a try.