There is a newer audio format available for free audio book downloads. It is an MP3 CD. Many of today's new CD players are able to handle this format, but some of the older players do not. What makes this format so great for audio books is the data is compressed in an MP3 format.
What does this mean for you? This means you will get often get your free audio books downloaded onto one MP3 CD, instead of many like traditional MP3 files. The sound quality is somewhat reduced, especially for music, but the low resolution of these CD's is higher than you need for spoken word to sound terrific.
Here are the following steps to convert your MP3 CD audio books into a file format you can listen to on an iPod. (These instructions will work for an iPod 5 or 6)
Check to see that you iTunes import settings are correct for an audio book.
You can do this by going into the Preferences/Importing section and be sure you have the settings for spoken word. Next, insert the MP3 CD and find it on "My Computer". Using Windows Explorer, open the correctly titled CD and find the 'playlist.m3u' file. Double click the file to open it with your iTunes. Your audio book will probably begin playing as iTunes start importing the file. Hit the pause button to stop the playback.
Listening to the book now would be interrupted when you go through the next few steps. Let iTunes finish importing your file. It could take a little while to finish, but al least you don't have to swap out CD's to import all of the audio book.
Be sure your audio book tracks have the title of the book in the file name. Search for the title in the iTunes search field. You want to see a window showing all of the imported files and nothing more. Select all of those files or tracks for your audio book.
Click on the "Advanced menu" and choose "convert selection to AAC". This will convert all of those large files to an AAC field, which will save you a good deal of disk space. This again may take some time. When you are done, you will have duplicated all those tracks from your audio book.
While this does not finish your process, it has duplicated the MP3 audio books download files to iPod files.
