Audiobooks on CD, USB Stick and in the Car

USB stick, audio CD or MP3 CD?

A USB stick is the easiest if your car has a port: one stick holds the whole book and the stereo shows the track names. CDs are for older cars and home CD players; an audio CD plays anywhere, an MP3 CD holds far more but needs a player that reads MP3 discs.^1,3

What car stereos actually read

Every manufacturer publishes limits for its USB port. These are from the owner’s manuals we could read, model by model:

What they agree on is the safe recipe: MP3, on a FAT32 stick, with no more than 255 files in a folder, ID3v2.3 tags, and plain file names. Kia adds that “sound quality of music files using a bit rate in more than 192 kbps is not guaranteed”,⁷ so there’s no point going higher; 128 kbps is plenty for a voice. None of these manuals lists .m4b, and some Kia units play no AAC at all, so convert an M4B before it goes in the car.

Put an audiobook on a USB stick

1. 1

   Make the tracks

   Drop your M4B or MP3 into the M4B to MP3 converter and choose Car or USB stick: numbered MP3 tracks of up to 10 minutes, each starting at a chapter or in a pause, with plain file names and tags car stereos read.

2. 2

   Prepare the stick

   Use a stick your stereo’s manual allows, often 16 or 32 GB or smaller, formatted FAT32 (Windows: right-click the drive, Format; Mac: Disk Utility, MS-DOS (FAT)). Formatting erases it.

3. 3

   Copy the folder in one go

   Unzip the download on your computer, then copy the whole book folder onto the stick in one action. Some stereos play files in the order they were copied, and the folder arrives in order.

4. 4

   Eject, then play

   Eject the stick safely before pulling it out, plug it into the car and choose USB. Open the book’s folder and start at track 01.

Long books get more than one folder: with tracks of 10 minutes, a 40-hour book is 240 tracks, within the 255 a folder that Mazda and Toyota allow; past that, the converter starts a second folder.^11,12 Short tracks matter in the car, where the stereo’s buttons move a track at a time: with 10-minute tracks, finding your place again is a short way back, not a 2-hour chapter.

Burn an audiobook to audio CDs

An audio CD holds up to 80 minutes, in up to 99 tracks.^1,6 (The 74-minute original was chosen so that one performance of Beethoven’s Ninth would fit.)¹⁷ The 99 comes from the CD format itself, which numbers tracks 01 to 99.⁵ So a book has to be cut into disc-sized pieces, each a run of short tracks:

• The converter’s Audio CDs setting fills each disc with whole tracks up to 79½ minutes, leaving room for the gap a burner may put between tracks, and puts each disc in its own folder.
• Tracks of about 5 minutes make skipping back easy; every chapter starts a new track.
• Burn each disc folder as its own disc, in order, and label the discs as you go.

MP3 CDs: hours on one disc

A data CD holds about 700 MB, which Microsoft puts at “roughly 8 hours of music”.¹ Narration needs less: at 128 kbps that is about 12 hours, at 64 kbps about 24. The catch is the player: Apple says MP3 CDs play “on MP3-capable CD players or your computer”,³ and car manuals that support them say so, as Honda’s does for MP3, WMA and AAC discs.¹⁵ If yours does, the converter’s MP3 CDs setting fills each disc up to 690 MB; burn each folder as a data disc (Windows Media Player: Data CD; Music on a Mac: MP3 CD).^1,3

From audiobook CDs to one file

Going the other way, a boxed set of CDs you own can become a single audiobook file for your phone.

1. Rip each disc. On Windows, Windows Media Player’s Rip CD saves WMA, WAV or MP3 (choose under Rip settings).¹ On a Mac, insert the disc in the Music app and import it; the default is AAC.⁴
2. Keep the order. Put each disc’s tracks in a numbered folder (Disc 01, Disc 02…) so nothing gets shuffled.
3. Merge into one M4B. The MP3 to M4B tool (or audio to M4B for AAC, WMA or WAV) joins every track into one file with a chapter per track, cover and tags; rename chapters in the chapter editor, or let the chapter detector find the spoken “Chapter One”s.