I like audiobooks. I listen to them when I’m driving or cleaning the garage or pretty much anything that doesn’t require actual concentration. Some I get from places like LibriVox. I’ve found some really good ones at my local library. Until recently, though, it was something of a pain to listen to them on my iPod. I’ve figured out the perfect method, though. As usual, smart playlists are the answer.

I create a smart playlist with rules like this:
Artist is John Hodgeman
Album is The Areas of My Expertise
Play Count is less than 1

That pulls all the tracks in the audiobook for the playlist. I make sure they’re sorted in the right order, then right click the playlist and hit Copy To Play Order to be sure. Then I select all, right click, and hit Get Info. At the bottom, I change Remember Position to Yes so that if I stop listening in the middle of a track, when I start up again it’ll be right where I left off. I also change Skip When Shuffling to Yes so that if I have the iPod in shuffle mode, it won’t play any of the audiobook tracks. I don’t have to worry about hitting the chapters out of order or anything.

The beautiful part of this is the Play Count rule. Whenever I finish listening to a track, it drops off the playlist. Whenever I want to pick this audiobook back up again, I just scroll to this smart playlist and hit play.