If you like to listen to audio books on your IPod, you may be wondering how you can load your own audio books from MP3 files and have them show up under the “Audiobooks” category on your IPod.

If you load your audiobook files onto your IPod as MP3s, they will show up under Music and not Audiobooks. The MP3 files need to be converted to the M4B format.

There are a couple different ways to make M4B files. I’ve listed two methods below. Depending on if you want to combine your files into fewer files will determine which method you should probably use.

Using Itunes to convert your files

The easiest method is to use Itunes to do the converting. To do this, you need to import your files into Itunes as MP3 files. Once they are imported, find them in the list of Music (Hopefully they are tagged correctly to make it easy to find them). Next, select all the files you wish to convert and right-click on your selection and select the option “Convert selection to AAC”. This will convert your audio files to M4P files. Then, once they have all been converted, just remove the MP3 and M4P versions from your music list, rename all the converted M4P files to M4B and reimport them into Itunes. Now, your audiobook files should be under the “Audiobooks” category.

Using a third-party program

I have also found the “MP3 to iPod Audio Book Convert” useful when I want to combine multiple files into one M4B. You can add all the MP3 files you want and it will process them all into one M4B for you. This program allows you to do some limited tagging on the newly created file as well.

One note on using this converter: I’ve found that my Ipod sometimes chokes on audiobooks that are only one large file. If you stop listening to the audiobook and switch over to music and then go back, the marker that holds your place sometimes resets to the beginning. This can be annoying when you are near the end and have to fast-forward for several minutes to get back to your place. I’ve found that combining your files works best if you limit the size to around the length of a CD or if you break your audiobooks up by making each chapter its own file.