Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Dude, where's my audiobook?

I love my iPhone, but I find I often hate iTunes, at least iTunes for Windows.

I started out today feeling very cranky towards iTunes. You see I've been listening to an audiobook during my drive to work. It happens that this book is Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, which is an amazing tech-thriller that I've been pretty hooked on for the past couple of weeks. So, as usual I was looking forward to the drive into work to find out what was going to happen next in Daemon. I got in my car, went to start up the audiobook only to find that the audiobook file on my iPhone was in fact completely missing. Panic...Cursed iTunes! Forget the fact that I also happened to forget my cup of coffee at home, this was going to make my next 30 minutes on the road...well, boring. Oh yeah, and the ride home in the afternoon was going to blow as well.

Moving on, I flipped to some new music I had and I made it through, thinking to myself, "How the heck does this happen?" I had synced my iPhone the night before, I usually do this every couple of days so I really didn't understand why this would have caused such a problem. I had other new music on there, new apps too. It's not like the sync didn't work at all.

In iTunes, I use the option where I only sync those items that I explicitly check. So, I knew I had the 2 audiobook files (part 1 and part 2) checked to sync to my iPhone; that's how I had been listening to them for the past 2 weeks. Besides, anything purchased from iTunes is automatically "checked" for syncing. It turns out, the the "Part 1" file was on my iPhone. I was simply missing the "Part 2" file which happened to be the part I was on. I had finished part 1 a couple of days before. I just couldn't figure it out; neither could anyone else I griped about it to. Maybe the Daemon had actually taken over my iPhone.

Well, as it turns out, I actually figured it out. As soon as I got home, I immediately opened iTunes on my PC and I looked to see if the audiobook file was indeed checked. It was. Hmmmm. It had to be something else. So, I checked my "sync" preferences for my iPhone: iPhone > Books (tab) > Sync Audiobooks. It turns out that iTunes had recently upgraded itself. By default, under the Sync Audiobooks setting, the "Selected Audiobooks" option was automatically selected, meaning that by default, only the audiobooks I had explicitly selected under this option (there is a list of all of my audiobooks there) would be synced. Daemon was not one of the audiobooks selected; in fact there were no audiobooks selected. However, under the "Include Audiobooks from Playlists" option the "Recently Played" playlist was checked, which explains why the Part 1 file was available: it was recently played, and the part 2 file was not, I was still in the middle of playing it. I'm guessing these Sync Audiobooks settings are new, or for some reason these settings were maliciously changed as a part of the upgrade....frustrating.

So, the mystery is solved. I still blame iTunes....it kinda seems like a bug and I'm betting I'm not the only one in the world that has experienced this. It's crazy how Apple puts so much perfection into the hardware and the device itself, but the supporting software is really stinky.

I have now properly checked my audiobook and I look forward to the ride into work tomorrow.