No longer able to edit meta data in Audio Books in Catalina ?

[Rod]

My wife has a large Audio Book Library and under iTunes was able to edit meta data like genre, create single books from individual tracks, edit Titles, Author etc but under the new Books app you can no longer even go to Get Info on any file.

See this article; How Do I Manage My Audiobook Library In MacOS Catalina?

This is obviously going to be a bigger problem for some than others. I have even read a suggestion of a way to instal a version of the old iTunes onto Catalina to overcome these problems.

Seems a bit short sighted of Apple, they probably never imagined that people would have such extensive Audio Book libraries not sourced from the iTunes Store. My wife downloads all her Audio Books from an online source connected to our Public Library in Australia for free and I suspect many others do the same.

Not really being a user of audiobooks I have just begun to scratch the surface of written books on my new, larger iPad and my small library of 6 books has only just begun. None the less I too have just started using Apple Books. It is quite different to Mojave so I’m wondering if anybody has any observations or insights into Catalina’s new Books app?

 

[IWT]

Hi Rod

I don't know if this will help but I recall an article on the subject by Kirk McElhearn and it's taken me ages to find it given that he writes articles all over the place.

Anyway, I found what I was looking for. In a way, it may solve your problem. Although he doesn't address the question of metadata specifically, he does talk how you can manage/move Audiobooks into the Music part of iTunes from which I (not necessarily he) presume that you can make some alterations similar to pre-Catalina?

Whatever, here's the Link: How to Manage Audiobooks in a Post-iTunes World – Kirkville

Just hope it might help

Ian

 

[Rod]

Thanks Ian, I'll check it out tomorrow. 1130 pm here now so about tonhit the sack.

 

[ferrarr]

Did you check out the help pages from Apple Books?

Read books and more with Apple Books - Apple Support

 

[Rod]

Thanks Bob, that's really handy, I had not yet found that page. Ive made a copy of it for future reference.
Ian, I read your linked article too and I can see how some of the ideas mentioned might be helpful but there are drawbacks using iTunes for AudioBooks like, "Music app has no support for embedded chapters. So if you have an audiobook in a single audio file with embedded chapters (as I do for certain ones I’ve created), there’s no way to navigate it".
In a ideal world Books would have retained similar options as the Music app but alas that is not the case.
My wife and I are members of our local library in Australia. Linked to that library is Bolinda Audio which is a data base that allows members to "borrow" books in audio format. Sometimes the books do not contain all of the meta data and some none at all.
In the past my wife would import these files to iTunes/Music and using the Get Info command she could batch edit the files as part of a collection with chapter/track numbers, Author, Title, published date etc.
When one opens the Books app for the first time it imports all of the Audio Books from Music. When my wife did this two of the books were shown as a series of individual tracks numbered 1-whatever with "No Name" as the title.
The only way to sort them in Books is to create a playlist and name that.
The other thing we noticed was how difficult it was to select more than one line in Tile view however List view overcomes this.
In the past when this happened it was simply a matter of selecting all the seperate tracks together and editing Title, Author and Year in one go.
This is something we got used to back in the days when Talking Books were on disks. I imagine in the future this will be less of a problem for my wife but it will continue to be an issue for some as explained in Ian's link.
The introduction of this new app has removed flexibility and functionality rather than enhancing or much improving what we had before and that seems to be a general observation of macOS upgrades.
Everything works perfectly if you work within Apple's expectations eg. buy/download your music, movies, books, apps, games from Apple or approved portals but stray outside the expectations and it is becoming increasingly difficult to adapt native apps to cope. These days we have to look to 3rd party apps (so long as they are 64bit now) to make adaptions/alterations or add functionality for example, I don't know how I'd manage with VLC Player so why not a better version of QuickTime?