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My son has learning disabilities, he is in college, and there was no audiobook available for one of his textbooks. I have spent hours recording the book for him, creating chapters as I went along. I imported the file into i-Tunes, and have run into two problems.

  1. The chapters I marked in GarageBand do not show up in iTunes, so I cannot simply go to Chapter 3, for instance - I have to listen/scroll along to find where a specific chapter begins. Is there a way to fix this, so that he can go directly to a certain chapter?

  2. The file is too large to send via email, so I need to figure out one of two options: Can the file be broken into chapters and sent individually? This could resolve the problem above... Or, secondly, is there a way for me to share it using iTunes store (or would that be violating copyright to share it on iTunes?) Or, can anyone come up with another way to accomplish this?

He is far from home and we will not see him before the end of his year, so we need to be able to do this via email or web... I can send him the file in hard copy - either a thumb drive or disc - but will chapters be visible there? I suspect not, given that we'd be copying from iTunes, where they are not visible...

I was planning to send this to him today, so I'm hoping someone will have some ideas that can help me...

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  • Is storing the file in DropBox or any cloud-service an option for you? Your son will be able to download the file then.
    – Rob
    Mar 4, 2014 at 15:09

1 Answer 1

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Yes, you should break it up so that you can solve both problems.

The easiest way to do this is to create another track and mute it.

Then you can use the + T "Split" function at each chapter (if need)

Finally drag all the audio but the current chapter you are exporting into the muted track. (Use select all and then shift-click the chapter you want to leave behind to unselect just that one.)

Forgot to mention:

You will do one export for each chapter.

In my experience when you export this it won't have a lot of silence after the end of the chapter, but if it does there is a UI element (I don't know the name) but it is a purple triangle in the time line that you can drag to the end of the audio you want to export.

It will take a bit, but you can do it.

One last note: since it is spoken word, you can export it at a pretty low bit rate. I use the "Mono Podcast" all the time and it is fine.

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  • Nice solution, I think time will not be the problem as the OP already spent hours on recording the book manually.
    – Rob
    Mar 4, 2014 at 15:10

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