Suggestions needed....Change is hard!

[honeynougat]

So backstory, I've just recently upgraded from an iPhone 4 (ios6?) to a XR. I had been looking forward to finally fitting my whole podfic collection in all its curated, tagged, metadata'd, smart playlisted glory onto one device at the same time... only to be horrified to find out that iOS now puts all files set as 'audiobooks' into the book app and not the music one. No sorting to be found. After freaking out a little, I did figure out one workaround. If I set all my podfic back to 'music' then I can still play them through the music app...but they no longer remember the playback position. I'd also like to still be able to have an actual music collection to shuffle without worrying about podfic popping up at inappropropriate times!

Please tell me someone has a good system they can share! In a perfect world I'd be able to just use my current playlists while still retaining functionality. That said, if anyone has alternative apps, systems, hacks... anything! Please help me out, my google-fu is failing me <3

Comments

[jainas]

My only suggestion would be to put the podfic in a different file than the rest of the music/autiobooks, download an extra music app and use it only for the podfics, so they dont get mixed with the rest. I'm not sure how well that would work though.

[haikitteh]

Hmm, I haven't used the native apple apps for podfics in a while, so no ideas there. I use the Cloudbeats app, and upload podfics into it through mediafire. It's kind of a hassle to set up, but once you're past the set up it's pretty seamless.

[linbot]

I don't think it can do everything you want, but I've been using Downcast to listen to .m4b files of podfic. Sadly it doesn't have smart playlists or tagging, but at least they're there. I use airdrop on my mac to transfer the files over wifi.

I've been thinking I might try organising the m4b files on my hard drive into fandom folders then use subfolders for further organisation, but that does sound like more work.

Good luck!

[cathexys]

I had the same problem last year when the most recent update changed this and all my organization and metadata got shot to hell and were stuck in books. I just quit, because renaming all my files yet again didn't seem reasonable, and I do my organizing on my HD these days mostly, but the thing that annoys me most about both the Music and the Books apps is that they're now so embedded with the purchasing aspects and the istore. Like, if I want to buy music, I'll get the mp3s and upload them. I don't want to constantly be connected to the istore. Argh!!!

Sorry, not really helpful. Just ranting along with you that this is the worst update they could have made!!!

[gunpowderandlove]

It's been a while since I had an iPhone but what I think people do is use iBooks for all their podfic. (You can set mp3s to be seen as audiobooks just as you set m4bs to be music). This way it saves your place and it won't show up in with your music.

Then you can organize your podfics by "Title". The best way, so I've heard, to do that is to make each title called "[Fandom] Title" or "Fandom: Title" (as long as you are consistant) (replacing Fandom for pairing or whatever else you sort by) and then the "Chapter" is the title of the podfic.

The reason you would have to do "Fandom: Title" instead of just "Fandom" in the title category is that if you did the latter, everything for that fandom would be put into one audiobook which is not correct.

Of course, this would mean changing the metadata for all your podfics and it sounds like you have a lot. I hope there is a better solution out there!

Edit: Bess has a very in depth podfic organizing post for itunes on her livejournal. iTunes has changed a little since that post, but the general concept is there.

[honeynougat]

That would be one way to work around it! Thanks for the input!

[honeynougat]

I'll look into it! I've got 2000+ podfic, so I'd like to avoid any major rearranging, but maybe it can't be helped!

[honeynougat]

Thanks, I need it haha. I've been considering doing the 'hard' thing and ordering the files physically as well, but then my OCD want me to be able to cross reference which I can't do with 'physical' folder directories >.<

I'll look into Downcast though, thanks for the tip!

[honeynougat]

It's the freaking pits! Here I was thinking I was being smart to stick with an iphone since my podfic library is all organised in itunes. Makes me wish I had researched it a little more and then maybe I would have realised there was no reason to not make the switch to android. Sigh.

The store integration thing is crazy annoying. I was using an iphone 4 for almost 8 years, I really didn't realise it had changed so much. I am holding onto hope that someone else with this same problem will have made an app that fixes everything. I really really don't want to physically move and sort all 2447 podfic I have downloaded!!

Thanks for ranting with me! It makes me feel better to know I'm not alone in the frustration <3

[honeynougat]

This is exactly the problem. I have my 2000+ downloaded podfic tagged and named in an almost identical fashion format to the linked tutorial, barring a few of my own idiosyncrasies. They are all set as audiobooks. The problem is in a recent update, all audiobooks get pushed to the ibooks app, where you can't sort by anything but name, so all the carefully inputted metadata is basically useless. And it is incredibly unwieldy to use. Unfortunately looks like I'm out of luck unless I can find a new app that can work with itunes metadata, or I suck it up and set all podfic to 'music' and sacrifice the position recall.

I appreciate the input though ^_^

[freekydj]

I would look into downloading either bookmobile or kybooks. I use both. I know I used to be able to put them on my Iphone via itunes. But recently I've been just downloading directly into the apps. Both also let you edit metadata.