Audiobooks on Yoto: Make Your Own Card Limits and Upload

How much fits on a Yoto card

Yoto’s help sets the limits for a Make Your Own card: “100 tracks per card · 100 MB / 60 minutes maximum file size of any single track · 500 MB / 5 hours maximum total file size of the audio content for any one card”.¹ Its Make Your Own page repeats the track and size limits without the 5 hours.² Those limits apply to your own playlists, not to Yoto’s ready-made cards.¹

So a book of up to 5 hours fits on one card, and a 10-hour novel needs two or three. Yoto transcodes what you upload to suit its players,⁴ so there’s no point uploading at a high bitrate: 128 kbps MP3 is plenty for a voice.

Put an audiobook on a Yoto card

1. 1

   Start with a DRM-free audiobook

   An MP3 or M4B you own outright: a LibriVox classic, a Libro.fm download, CDs you ripped, or your own recording. Store audiobooks from Audible or Libby are protected and can’t be used.

2. 2

   Make Yoto-sized tracks

   Drop it into the M4B to MP3 converter and choose Yoto cards. Every chapter becomes a track (long ones cut in a pause), and the book is grouped into cards that fit Yoto’s limits.

3. 3

   Upload to a playlist

   On a computer, go to my.yotoplay.com/my-cards, make a new playlist, name it after the book and add the MP3s from one card folder, in order.

4. 4

   Pick icons

   Give each track an icon (you can upload your own 16 × 16 pixel image), so a child can see where they are on the player’s screen.

5. 5

   Link to a card

   In the playlist’s three-dot menu choose Link to a Card, then insert a blank Make Your Own card. Play it once while online; after that it plays anywhere.

Yoto’s own instructions cover the upload: on a computer, go to my.yotoplay.com/my-cards; to finish, “tap the three dot menu and select Link to a Card” and insert a Make Your Own card.³ Each track can have its own icon, and you can upload your own (PNG, GIF, JPG, TIF or SVG; Yoto suggests 16 × 16 pixels with a transparent background and no black).⁵ A longer book becomes one playlist and one card per card folder in the download.

What you can and can’t put on a card

• Can: “any content that you own that is in MP3 or AAC/M4A format”, in Yoto’s words: your own recordings, CDs you own, DRM-free purchases, and public-domain recordings such as LibriVox’s volunteer readings of classic books.^2,15
• Can’t: protected audiobooks. Yoto warns that “audiobooks purchased on iTunes tend to be DRM protected”;² Audible’s files are protected, and Libby says its audiobooks “can’t be transferred to MP3 players or iPods”.¹⁶ This site never removes DRM.
• Rights: “Only make and share MYO cards using audio that you created or that you have permission to use.”¹¹ Yoto may remove or disable shared content that breaches copyright.¹²

Cards, Club, offline and storage

• Blank cards: every player comes with one,² and a pack of five costs £12.99 in the UK; the US store listed it at $15.29 (reduced from $17.99) when we checked.^7,8
• Yoto Club is “an entirely optional service”; Make Your Own doesn’t need it.⁶
• Offline: a player needs to be online “only twice: when you first set it up, and the first time you play each card”.⁹
• Storage: 64 GB (at least 1,000 hours) on the fourth-generation Player and Mini, 32 GB on the third-generation Player; when it fills, the player removes the audio that hasn’t been played for longest.¹⁰

Yoto or a Creative-Tonie?

Tonies’ answer to Make Your Own is the Creative-Tonie, a figure with “90 minutes of space to fill with your own custom content”.¹³ The tonies app takes MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG and WMA files of up to 1 GB.¹⁴ That suits a short story collection; a full-length audiobook fits a Yoto card better, at up to 5 hours a card.¹

More on DRM-free sources in free audiobooks, and on other devices in audiobooks on CD, USB and in the car.