Database Develop

Audiobooks?

I listen to a lot of audiobooks during my work commute and used to use my iPod for this. Since I have a decent sized memory card in my X1, I'd rather use it instead so I only need one device with me. The problem is that all of my audiobooks are in .m4b format, so I need something that runs on WinMo that can:
1. Play this .m4b format (I think it's just AAC)
2. Bookmark where I am in each book so if I close and re-open the player, the book continues from where I left off
3. Allows fine tuned rewind/fast forward as I often rewind 5-30 seconds to hear some part of a book a second time
I've found tcpmp/core player can play .m4b's, but it's not great at bookmarking. That is, if I'm listening to a book, close the player and re-open it, the bookmark works fine and it continues to play where I left off. However, if I open any other file in between, the bookmark is lost. This is made worse by the inability to do any fine tuned rewind/fast forward. The only option is to use the progress slider, which tends to jump in VERY large increments.
Any suggestions? Is there another audiobook format I should try which would work better?

Convert to MP3 then use something like:
http://motorola-windows-mobile.hand...id=1093&for=Motorola+Windows+Mobile audiobook
Unfortunately m4b is a gash Apple format and so needs to be converted...

You could also try Kinoma (www.kinoma.com). Not sure if it plays .mb4, I use it for books from audible.

I personally just use the standard windows media player, I also listen to alot of audiobooks usually a few hours a day and when I get to and from work I use the notes program to make a note of where I am. This isn't necessery all the time because I can just minimize windows media player and then start it back up when I want to carry on listening (the program doesn't fully close when pressing x)
I have never used an audiobook on an ipod so im not sure what type of support it has though it would be nice to have the feature but it isn't something I really need, it's easy to do without.

bump for more opinions.

I use CorePalayer for my audio books.
http://www.coreplayer.com/

Resco Audio Recorder allows you to bookmark MP3 files at specific points (Store lots of bookmarks for various MP3's), it's also got a finger friendly fast forward/rewind.
According to the website it plays the following files
MP3 — The most popular audio format ever. Widely supported by all platforms. Ideal trade off between quality and hardware requirements.
Ogg Vorbis — Alternative to MP3 with higher quality, but requires faster PDA.
Speex — Outstanding speech compression ratio, but also needs fast device.
WAV — Lossless quality, low hardware requirements, but huge memory consumption.
RAF — Minimal hardware requirements, minimal energy consumption, compresstion ratio 4:1.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It also can do standard voice recording and phone call recording
Edit: Just looked on their site. They have a Codec pack addon that allows recording/playing of AAC files
Second Edit: They also have a seven day demo (I'm assuming you can add the demo of the codec pack as well) So that you can test it to see if you like the software

THJahar said:
Resco Audio Recorder allows you to bookmark MP3 files at specific points (Store lots of bookmarks for various MP3's), it's also got a finger friendly fast forward/rewind.
According to the website it plays the following files
It also can do standard voice recording and phone call recording
Edit: Just looked on their site. They have a Codec pack addon that allows recording/playing of AAC files
Second Edit: They also have a seven day demo (I'm assuming you can add the demo of the codec pack as well) So that you can test it to see if you like the software
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ooooh, now this is what I was looking for. The bookmarking feature works very well for my audiobooks and the touch friendly controls are exactly what I was looking for. It doesn't seem to like the m4b files, even with the AAC codec, but I can easily convert my m4b's to mp3's and everything works wonderfully.
Thanks!

Or have a look at MortPlayer.
With favorites (easy navigation through your music/audiobook folders), special audio book support (auto bookmarks for audio book files/folders, auto rewind when continuing, ...), bookmarks, finger friendly since the first beta (somewhere in 2004, iirc), skin support (including WVGA since 3.31b73), ...
However, the AAC/MP4 plugin from GSPlayer (included in beta installers) doesn't work properly on all devices, and I'm not sure whether m4b is included...

Hey, I found out, that Audiooboks in the m4B Format can't be handled by the Mort Player.
BUT
If you rename the file from m4b to m4a the player can handle them.
Cheers
Jens

I was very excited to try this as I have a number of .m4b audiobooks I would like to listen to on the Android. But I just tried renaming an .m4b file to an .m4a file on my Android G1 and it still did not play I have been using the Ambling BookPlayer which works well with mp3, oog, or m4a files, but renaming the m4b to m4a didn't work.
The Ambling BookPlayer has worked very well for playing audiobooks even those that have a lot of individual audio files, and it has a bookmarking history with undo and redo so you can jump right back to each place you started or stopped listening. The Ambling BookPlayer Lite is free on the Android Market and it supports automatically downloading the free LibriVox audiobooks directly to the Android.
I would be interested in knowing if anyone else been able to successfully play an m4b file after renaming it to an m4a? and if so which Android phone does it work on?

I found that there is a request for Google to add support for the m4b format to the Android at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3923 You can boost the priority of this request by going to the page and clicking on the star to cast your vote in favor of adding this feature.

Audiobooks from iTunes in M4B are encrypted. Simply renaming the files from .m4b to .m4a will not help. You need to decrypt the files first. Google for Requiem.

The m4b format does support encryption. Some m4b audio files are encrypted but others are not.
If you get one of the conversion programs (there are many available) that will convert mp3 files into m4b files, the resulting m4b files are not encrypted. Other m4b files, such as those sold by some stores, are encrypted.
If you purchase an audiobook on CD, rip it to mp3s, combine them and convert them to an m4b (just for the purpose of getting bookmarking to keep track of your place in the audiobook), the resulting m4b file is not encrypted.

new player app
Here is a new Android app Akimbo Audiobook Player that has m4b support with chapters and artwork. Finally I have got back to where I was years ago on the ipod

Album Music Out of Order in TF3D Tab

Since a few days ago, when I sync music onto my Diamond (I use WMP since I convert my MP3s to WMA), the album tracks are always mixed up. My previous syncs kept the album listings intact, but now they're random.
Does anyone know what causes this problem and if there's any solutions? Thanks.
EDIT: Does the TF3D Music Tab follow music tags? I'm assuming it isn't for some of my music since I have it properly tagged for track listings.

Track order...
I use WMA as I've always used Media Player when ripping my CD's to my PC. You're right, the tracks do get mixed up with HTC's music player (it may be the tags, I don't know... perhaps they assume we're all MP3 users!).
The best way to sync them (in my opinion), is to first create a new playlist within Windows Media Player (name it the same as the album), drag whichever album it is you want on your device into the playlist (the right hand pane in media player), then drag the playlist you've just created into the sync window (rather than the album itself). This will keep your tracks in the order they're meant to be in.
You may also need to rename the album art on your device because Windows Media Player sometimes calls the art Album_Art{blah, blah, blah...}, which admitedly seems a very descriptive file name for what it is, but HTC's Music Player won't recognise it, so the album art needs to be renamed 'Folder'.
Sorry for the long-winded answer. Hope it helps.

Thanks for the tip. Seems to help.
I still wonder what causes this to happen, gets annoying.

I had the same problem with my albums. I found out that TF3D sorts the music files by their track number tag.
So check your track tag, and number the tracks the way you want them to be sorted.

Hi, does anyone know how to resolve this issue properly? I mean, How to list and play WMA album tracks on Diamond correctly by track number? Because for MP3 it works fine, why for WMA not? File names and Tags are ok and works perfect in WMP, thanx for infos...

G1 won't recognise WMA ID3 tags!

so figured it out- neither tunewiki nor music will read the id3 tags from WMA files-
problem is most of my music has been ripped to WMA format due to it being smaller than MP3-
So i have 3 options:
1. convert the WMA files to OGG format
2. rerip all the albums to OGG
3. find a decent player that recognises WMA ID3 tags
any help with any of these would be much appreciated.
thanks

Looks like it's time to rerip.
As much as I say go open source, why not rerip in MP3? Granted it may be a somewhat aging codec (and patent-encumbered), but it's a de-facto standard that is guaranteed to work on almost any device that plays digital music.

[Q] MP3 Compilation Album

I bought 'Anthems' Ministry Of Sound Electronic 80's Volume 2 from Amazon MP3 and it shows in Music as about 60 different 'Albums' each with one song in it. Perhaps 2 songs if there is more than one track by a particular artist on the compilation. This is not good as I can't play the Album.
I imported the set of MP3s into iTunes, and it shows on iTunes and on my iPod as a single album. Must have got that from the ID3 tags, I guess?
I deleted the album from my Amazon MP3 folder on the Galaxy, then used DoubleTwist to import it back onto the Galaxy from my iTunes library, and it /still/ has 60 different 'Albums'.
How can I get this album to show as one Album? I've tried the Galaxy stock Music player, and MixZing and Zimly. They all show it as multiple albums.
I'm trying to get rid of my iPod and use the Galaxy as my main music source, but things like this are getting me down.
Please help!
Thanks

Done some searching and I find that compilation albums are a sore point in Android and no app will sort them properly. A lot of my music is multi artist compilation and it's just a mess in any player app that I can find. Just tried winamp too.
Guess I won't be replacing my ipod after all
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

Just use the folder option in the library to play the album.

Intratech said:
Just use the folder option in the library to play the album.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not sure what that means - if I look with Astro or My Files apps, each song is in a folder of its own, hanging off the 'Music' folder on my external SD. Single artist albums have all the songs in an Artist/Album/Song hierarchy.
it was probably done that way by doubletwist.

Download media monkey, copy the compilation, go into media monkey, find that copy, then using media monkey select all tracks, and change album name to whatever you want. Done!

Fix Found
Had this issue, it appears it's an ID3 tag error.
You can fix it by getting an app called ID3 fixer.
Select the folder that holds your music and set the charset to "US-ASCII (English)"
If you still have issues, try different charsets.

[Q] Music albums ungrouped after update?

Hi,
I finally decided to update my Milestone from some ancient CM6 mod to the CM7 mod. Now I have some problems with the music player app. Songs in compilations are split into separate albums for each.
So, how can I convince the music player to just sort albums by album name?

fix your mp3 tags: set the compilation tag and/or set the album_artist to the same value for all tracks from the album (e.g. "V/A")

sounds like a really bad solution imho, something that software just should do, not me. i would need to go through thousands of mp3s.
really no better solution? is the a problem with all modern android phones?

Well, just use a software that will do it for you.
Gingerbread mediascanner doesn't care about folder structure, only tags. So you should better fix them.

I don't really want to change any of my MP3s. I guess I'll just get an Iphone then.

enjoy .