Bruji

Hello,
I found today your software and I am wondering if this could be the solution to my audiobook-collection problem...
I collect since several years audiobooks (audioplays and readings as well). A lot of them I bought at amazon or ebay but also I record dayly readings from the radio...
Here in germany a lot of radiostations broadcast these readings every day in chunks of about 30 minutes... Mostly, these readings have been produced a long time ago and they are not buyable in any shop (or has ever been buyable)... I record the parts, import them into iTunes, fill up a lot of information by hand and so I can hear with my iPhone the readings whenever I want ...
Over the years my collection has grown to about 30000 files or 2500 audiobooks... Now my problem:
In iTunes there is no possibility to get some information from amazon automatically... I have to search by hand and copy and paste it into the fields... Mostly the original books are available at amazon so there is a short product description and some reviews and tags... I know, that these informations belong to another product (a book not the audiobook) But I'm looking for a way to get this information because as you can see easily, it is very difficult for me to find the right audiobook to hear next, because I don't know anything about the books exept the author and the person who reads the book.
My question is now: Is there a way to do a audiobook collection which has to be a mixture between bookpedia and cdpedia... With the possibility to get informations from amazon and if possible from iTunes.... I know this sounds crazy...
In my imagination it would be like this:
First: import of my iTunes library information into audiobookpedia....
Second: Try to get information from amazon for the regular audiobooks ( like cdpedia works for music cds...)
Third: Try to get information by hand for the "hard" cases.... get a barcodenumber from the original book, paste it into the items information and get with this all the information from amazon, than delete the infos which are wrong (like product-type: book)
This would make it very easy to built up a very big collection like mine.
There is also a database called hoerdat.de where all audioplays ever produced by the german radiostations are listed...
It would also be a great idea to link to a database like this like the amazon-link for getting this infos.... Right now I copy and paste the infos to the lyrics-field of the audioplay.

Perhaps it is already possible but I do not find the solution in cdpedia or bookpedia. In cdpedia I can import my audiobooks from iTunes but the infos from normal books at amazon could not be retrieved and assigned to a "CD". In bookpedia, I could retrieve bookinformations but no itunes-import is possible...

What do you think? Is there any possibilities to solve this...
Thanx for reading and sorry for my poor english....
Regards
maclatz

As you mentioned the problem here is the mix of audiobooks in iTunes. We do plan to add an import of audiobooks to Bookpedia but this would still not solve your problem as iTunes only marks audiobooks for it's own files and your imported snippets are most likely categorized under music. Our programs do have a flexible text import. If you can separate the CD files from the book files in two playlists in itunes you could then use the playlist export (text version) under the file menu and import each file to a different program. In CDpedia the name would map to "Track Names" so that it can create albums for tracks that go together. After that you would be able to do all the get more info from Amazon and add ISBN and information.

Another solution is that our programs have a plug-in architecture and can be extended. If you are familiar with programming you could create your own search plug-in for CDpedia that searches all product nodes at Amazon for information. You could even extend this plug-in to search hoerdat.de and other places. It would be a personal plug-in that does all this automatic gathering of data for you for you. Since CDpedia has the iTunes import you could import all your data in one go. Another advantage of the plug-in is that you could have it add customized information into the custom fields as you would know what attribute you would like in each one.

If your interested in plug-ins you can find more information at this forum post. This is a Bookpedia sample plug-in but they all work the same, the trick is to change the application that is used for debugging under "Executable" on the left hand column of Xcode.

Hello Conor,
thanks for your fast reply....
There is one thing, that has changed in iTunes 8.... From this version on, any file could be marked as "audiobook", not only the aac-files from apple....
I use this feature very often because with this my audiobooks could be seperated from my music... Also on my iPhone...

I'm not familiar with programming in objective c (I only do some xhtml, css and javascript stuff...) so I have to look if I can do these changes....

I will try your suggestion for cdpedia and the text export.... I'm excited, cause this is the first approach which seems to solve some of my collection-problems....
Thanks for your work
maclatz