iPod took a step backwards in design and now I can’t listen to audiobooks

I got my first iPod shortly after they first hit the market it was a 1st Generation 20GB. That worked great for what it was. A t first I used it just for music. When I started college and then latter started working I used it for audiobooks. I like reading but I don’t have time to read an actual book so I listen to them on my iPod in the car on the way to and from work of while I work around the house. On my old iPod (that finally died a few days ago) if I wanted to find an audiobook I could go to Album on the Music menu and find it by title. I could go to artist and find it by author, or I could go genres and look under sci-fi, or mystery, or romance and find it. I could even find it under audiobooks. And it was always sorted by titles I clicked on the title and I’d get the tracks for that book and only that book.

Now on the new 120GB iPod Classic any audiobooks you put on your iPod will not show up under album, artist, or genres. The only places you can find an audiobook on the new iPods is to go to the Audiobook section under Music. But it only works if you only have one audiobook on the iPod. And then only if the tracks are titled alphabetically from start to finish. If one of the tracks is titled prologue expect to hear it right after the epilogue. Oh, and it has to have only 9 chapters. If it has more than that expect to hear chapter 10 right after chapter 1. And if you have move then one audiobook expect them to be mixed together. The new iPod takes all the audiobook and just dumps them in one big playlist ordered alphabetically by track title. Though it is nice enough to separate the chapters by book. So you get chapter 1 of one book then chapter 1 of another book and so on. The only way you’re going to get just one book in the right order (by track and disk number) is to go to search and type in either the title of the book or the author. I was told you could make playlists for each book to make it easier to find and listen to just one book and one book. I have 127 playlists just for any of my music in my iTunes library and a total of 915 audiobooks (some with as few as 1 2 hour long track or as many as 2000 tracks each about 30 seconds long) that would mean I’d have to search through 1042 playlists just too find one book that many only be one 2 hour track long. Yeah, that makes it so much easier. I got the iPod specifically to listen to audiobook, and it doesn’t work. It’s basically a $250 piece of crap.

And what really ticks me off is that iTunes has the nice section where you can keep any audiobook you have separate from your music albums. It made them a hell of a lot easier to find and it let me go into the music section, hit play and just let iTunes run through my music library without any problem, and only hear music. Now I have to into get info on all of my audiobooks. Go to Media Kind. And the change it from audiobook to music. And then I’ll my “new” iPod will actually acknowledge that they do in fact exist. So much for having an organized iTunes Library. Thanks ever so much. News flash Apple if you upgrade the hardware, don’t downgrade the software.