Audiobook Builder 2 4+

Excellent, easy to use well priced app

Just wanted to express my thanks and appreciation for this wonderful app that has easily created so many audio books that have benefited myself and friends and at such a reasonable price.
Listening in the car, relaxing at home and if needed sending me off to sleep - this app is a blessing.

Fails Consistently

Fails consistently to build larger projects (eg. longer, larger audiobooks from 100 mp3 files) and pops up with the error message ‘Audiobook Binding Failed - Can’t create output file’. . When it actually manages to complete compiling multiple MP3s to M4B for a smaller book the resulting files won’t play with spacebar on my intel iMac running Monterey 12.6, unlike all my other M4Bs which play instantly upon spacebar. So there’s something inherently wrong with the M4B exports from this app. The only app I could get them to play in is VLC (which will pretty much play anything, including a banana), but I don’t listen to Audiobooks (or bananas) in VLC so the weirdly encoded M4Bs from this app are useless to me. I will also note that I have another Audiobook binding app that has no trouble creating properly encoded, spacebar-able M4b files from the same Mp3 files - so I know these failures have nothing to do with my system. I’ve asked Apple for a refund.

Developer Response ,

We’re sorry to hear things aren’t working out there and we wish you’d reached out to our support folks before giving up on Audiobook Builder because we can help in situations like yours. If you’d like to give it a second chance, please keep reading.

Audiobook Builder can handle just about any number of files you can throw at it. For example, we regularly test with audiobooks of a thousand or more files without an issue. When you see an error while building, then, it usually comes down to something between the format of the original files added to your project and Apple’s AVFoundation framework, which Audiobook Builder relies on for converting audio data. This isn’t to say it’s Apple’s fault - it’s more about the wide variability in the quality of MP3 files you’ll find in the wild versus what Apple has chosen to support. We regularly encounter MP3 files that have been modified by several applications with somewhat questionable regard for the results, which we then work around by preprocessing so AVFoundation can handle them. It’s possible yours are in the same vein. In the best case, we can include a workaround as part of the official Audiobook Builder. In all but the worst cases, simply passing these through to new files with a tool like ffmpeg before adding to your project will do the trick. That tells us the issue, as far as AVFoundation is concerned, is truly with the original files. No matter what, we investigate every report like yours and put in serious effort to get things working. Reach out to support@splasm and we’ll give it our best.

The issue with using the spacebar to preview an audiobook, using the Mac’s Quick Look feature, happens only with audiobooks that contain chapter artwork - and in our tests it happens with audiobooks created by any application that include chapter art in their output. If your tests with another application produce output with chapter art and those files work with Quick Look, could you let us know which application that is at support@splasm.com so we can have a look? We reported this issue to Apple many years ago, and even tried to make a Quick Look plug-in that takes over responsibility for M4B files to work around it but the Mac just won’t allow it for that kind of file, so the ball’s in Apple’s court. These files only trip up Quick Look and will play as expected in Books and iTunes, as well as on iPhones, iPads, and iPods, so you’re definitely not limited to VLC. If Quick Look is a requirement, though, remove the artwork from each Chapter before building and you’re all set.

I hope we’ve helped in some way, if only to explain, though your return is likely well underway and so your review will disappear from the Mac App Store soon. We’re here, at support@splasm.com, if you’d like to work through the issue with those MP3 files!

Fantastic Utility

I've used this program for years, it is easy to use, reliable, and does exactly what I need. Highly recommended.