An Audiobook You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Purpose and Objective
I was curious about the audiobook format, and wanted to know what the process was for pulling files, splicing, and dicing in Audio Book Builder 2. So many audiobooks have cover art that isn't correctly reformatted for digital devices, and have inefficient ways of organizing metadata, which can make combing through chapters a nightmarish experience. I wanted to redo an audiobook. By taking free audio from a novel, setting up some simple cover art that can fit any screen size, and finding a more efficient and accurate way to organize metadata, I was able to create a more colorful and modern feel to the dark classic: Dracula. This was my test of Audio Book Builder 2.
I chose for my audiobook, to look into Librivox since it worked entirely with royalty free/public domain raw audiobook files. The transport of those files into Audio Book Builder 2 was quite simple. The process was for the most part fairly straight-forward. The only challenge from moving the files into Audio Book Builder was that the original data from Librivox held about 27 chapters.
I decided to condense these chapters into 7 major sections, where I just compiled chapters, each section having about 4 original chapters of content. For each one of these major sections I chose to go with Roman Numerals instead of normal “chapter” intros. Each section also had unique cover art designs. My purpose in working with this book was that I thought I could work creatively and freely with the cover art with this novel, and since the book is over 100 years old, its contents are public domain, making access much easier. My attempt was to make the audiobook more appealing by using colors of its original print in a digital format and then then parsing the audiobook files into chunks to make the listen seem less daunting, though no content was left out. The audiobook ended up having major sections, each with unique cover art, and much clearer organization of metadata.
Strategy
Once into Audiobook Builder, and once my cover art was prepared I moved into the metadata manipulation. This went smoothly for the most part. I did run across a few occasional issues where Audiobook Builder would have some issues with saving the correct dates in the “build options”. Other than this I chose to represent the original authors name more so in the metadata rather than the narrator’s name. For my book as well there was not just one narrator, it was a collection of several narrators, so I entitled those sections accordingly as “Various Artists”.
From Audiobook Builder I was able to name album artist and composer as “Various Artists” and this came out to the cleanest most refined looking end result once moved to iTunes.
One main issue I had in iTunes however was the release date and the year options. I was able to manipulate and add the correct Dracula date of May 26th, 1897 into the year option but the actual release date form would continue back to some other auto-generated date each time. I also chose not to add any comments on individual sections since there ended up not being nearly enough space for the amount of chapters condensed down to do a synopsis.
Device Testing
I found that the best organization in iTunes was adding the correct release date year, as it appears next to the title. I felt that the title and author set up came out the most clean in this format, showing the author, Bram Stoker’s name more often than “Various Artists”.
From this point I was able to transfer the audiobook to 3 other devices. I tested it on my Mac desktop, PC desktop, Ipad Pro, and Iphone. All devices displayed the content in a very sleek format, there was no pixelation in cover art and all of the metadata remained consistent and appeared correctly. The sizing came out very clean and centered as well, making for a more professional looking audiobook. I wanted to make everything on the cover art much larger, than usual, anticipating that the size given to view audiobooks digitally is very small. So I wanted to just simply have a sort of blood drip effect that would give the “Dracula” title and section a more 3 dimensional feel.
For my Ipad Pro display, once again the content transferred over very clearly and the metadata remained consistent, having only the crucial information: the section, book title, and who was reading it.
The other device I tested on was of course the desktop I was using to build the audiobook. My Mac displayed the content very well in its “player” format that can be turned on and off in the upper left hand corner of iTunes. The only difference that I came across in this formatting and only in this iTunes “player” option the metadata displays as: section, author, then title. This varied only slightly from the other formats but I still believed it to be sleek and neat enough to keep. There was not a simple way to get the metadata to remain with “Various Artists” in this section but have the authors name be more prevalent in the main iTunes screen, but I personally preferred the formatting better with the author’s name.
Conclusion
Overall the audiobook came out with a much more modern feel, while still keeping classic colors and themes in tact. All content and metadata was updated and crucial content was given more emphasis. For example the narrators were condensed into “Various Artists”, which was much simpler than listing each individual narrator after each chapter, that organization was cause for much confusion and clutter. Redesigning the cover art to better display the title and sections also helps users read the cover on smaller mobile devices. Organizing all of this content and data helped me to realize the importance of keeping track of files, and how much actual content is behind just what seem to be small audiobook files. It gives me a much greater perspective and appreciation for those who are able to manipulate and parse metadata into something user-friendly.
Christian Mercado is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction Design. This article relates to the “Audiobook Rebuild” project in the DGM 2260 course and is representative of the skills learned.
