Using Clip+ for audiobooks, about bookmarking, about sd cards

[pooklaroux]

I have a lot of audiobooks in various formats on microsd cards.  I'm listening to one of those books on my rockboxed sansa clip+ now  (sweet!) I missed Rockbox, I had it on my old Archos units years ago and it was awesome even then.  So much more so now, and so much easier to install. Woot for the installer!

Question is about bookmarks -- if my book is on an sd card, where are my bookmarks stored? Are they stored on the sd card or in the internal memory? (answered -- see below)

I'm going through all my audiobooks, and testing them to see how well they run with the clip+/rockbox 3.10.  I'll keep this thread updated with my observations.

[Lear]

Bookmarks are usually stored close to the bookmarked file, so they're on the SD card if the audio file is. The exception is the recent bookmarks list, which is stored in the internal memory. As long as you don't use any of the "Recent only" options, it should work fine.

Secion 8.6 of the manual contains more information about bookmarking.

[pooklaroux]

Thanks, I know I'm going to have to play with it for a while to get used to it, but that actually helps a lot.

[pooklaroux]

M4A's and MP3's seem to work best so far for audiobooks.  The  bookmarking is wonderful, really a lot better than on my old ipod, which I didn't expect.

[pooklaroux]

Okay -- to clarify --  I used to use an ipod classic to listen to audiobooks dl to my mac from audible, also I have been ripping  cd audiobooks that I own using itunes. My classic died a terrible death. So I have moved over to  the the Sansa Clip+ 

I was having a terrible time getting audible to work directly with my sansa clip+ and I was having a problem with audiobooks ripped to mp3 not being bookmarkible and not playing in sequence.  Also, I was having problems getting audible to store books on my sd card, it only seemed to want to store things on the internal memory.

Enter Rockbox. The m4b's directly from itunes library, some do play and some don't. If I figure out the difference, I will let you know. But if I convert the m4b's into m4a's they play perfectly every single one.  I have had no problem moving them to the Clip+, and they work fine from the sd card.

For the ripped cd audiobooks, I'm now using a program called "Audiobook Builder" I can just import the files I ripped from itunes, make sure they are in order, and create an m4a that works just like a commercially produced file. I listen to really long books (most are in excess of ten hrs long) and putting the mp3 files in this builder creates a much smaller m4a file than the originally collection of mp3's.

Both the m4a and mp3 audiobooks seem to work fine, and have a lot more bookmarking flexibility than on any other player. 

I also have many audiobooks that are mp3's with a m3u playlist that runs the book.  I haven't tried one of these on the rockbox yet, but I will and I will report.  I will probably end up putting these books through audiobook builder, because they take up a lot of room.

[saratoga]

Enter Rockbox. The m4b's directly from itunes library, some do play and some don't. If I figure out the difference, I will let you know. But if I convert the m4b's into m4a's they play perfectly every single one.

They should be the same thing. If you have one that doesn't work, file a bug report with a link to the file. 

[torne]

m4b is not a different format, it's just a signal to Apple software that it's a book and thus needs special handling for bookmarking. You may find that the files are encrypted with DRM: unlike with audio tracks (where iTunes distinguishes unencrypted m4a tfiles from encrypted m4p files), the m4b extension is used whether it's encrypted or not.