Last night I finally “upgraded” to MacOS Catalina. I’d been delaying the change while some of the programs I use were updated to Catalina compatibility.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realise that Apple, in their “wisdom” had removed iTunes and substituted Books and Music etc as separate programs.
Now … I use Audiobooks in my car, and have hundreds of them. Many are not from Audible.com, and are ones I generated myself from cassette or CD. As such, they are in m4b format.
Prior to the latest MacOS upgrade, I just put these into a playlist in iTunes, and made the sync to my iphone with ‘books from playlists’ ticked. Easy, and no problem. Meant that I didn’t need to keep a very large library on the phone, but could just move things in and out of itunes on the mac.
Alas, the latest iteration of Books on Catalina won’t let me do that, so I duly tried to put my current read into the Music App on the mac, only to find that it didn’t recognise them.
Ok, next step - try to convert the files from m4b. dBpoweramp didn’t recognise them, neither did Music Tag Editor.
Eventually finished up having to download the “Bound” app onto my phone, and put the m4b files into Dropbox. (only found out about this after a lengthy websearch)
How cumbersome, and how thoughtless of Apple to remove something that is used by many. Don’t they realise how many Audiobooks are not available from Audible (or Apple iTunes store)? Even if they were available in the newer format, why should anybody have to buy them AGAIN just to play them on their phones?
Not good customer relations.
