Reader Dave T. seeks to lessen some iTunes tedium. He writes:
I listen to audiobooks on my iPhone, ripped from discs I own. But ripping them is inconvenient as I load a CD into my iMac, iTunes pops up, I press Command-A to select all tracks, click on Options, select Join CD Tracks, click on Import CD, and finally click OK in the Import Settings window to import the selected tracks as a single track. Doing this for a 20 CD book is tiresome. Is there an easier way?
There is. It’s called Join Together, costs a measly $5, and was created by Doug Adams of Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. It works this way.
Launch Join Together. Insert an audio CD. Within the Finder, double-click on the CD icon so that you can see the files within. Select them and drag them into the Join Together window. They’ll appear in the Track List area.
To the right enter a name for the disc in the Name field (Tom Sawyer – Pt. 1, for example). You’re welcome to enter additional information below. At the bottom-right of the window choose an output format—AAC, mono, at 128kbps, for instance. Choose Audiobook from the Media Kind pop-up menu. Click the Export button and the tracks will be combined and converted to the format you’ve chosen. When Join Together has finished those jobs the resulting track will be added to iTunes. Repeat for the next 19 CDs.
Join Together makes relatively quick work of creating long audiobook files.
If you want to combine all 20 of these joined tracks into a single one, select them in iTunes and drag them into Join Together—there’s no need to hunt for the source files stored on your hard drive. Run them through the same process to create one realllly long file.