I said some days ago, that I wanted to buy an audiobook in Japanese and have it available on my phone to listen to it often. Well, I bought an audiobook on the site febe.jp, which is a site that sells Japanese audiobooks. I bought 世界から猫が消えたなら and I am very satisfied with it. The narrator speaks in a clear voice, other characters’ voices are made by different actors and the overall quality is really good. I will certainly make a review of it in some time.
But then, I encountered a problem: I could not listen to this audiobook on my iPhone. It took me some time to figure out how to do it, so I thought it might help other people too if I explained the procedure.
When you buy an audiobook on the site febe.jp, you can download it in mp3, which is a good thing because you can easily listen to it on any music player. If you are using iTunes, just import the file into your iTunes library and you can listen to your audiobook on your computer, with iTunes. So far, so good, but it won’t synchronise with your phone. Your iTunes library will tell you that it cannot send your audiobook in the cloud. I don’t know why, but it is so. What you have to do is go to “edit the information” of your audiobook (where you can change the title and so on) and choose “option”. You can tell iTunes that this file is not “music” but “audiobook”. If you do so, it will disappear from your music section and appear in your audiobook section. There, you can send it to the cloud. BUT, it still won’t synchronise with your iPhone, certainly because it is a mp3 and iTunes’ audiobook files are all m4b. BUT you don’t need to convert your file, just connect your iPhone to your computer and synchronise manually (go to the audiobook section of your iPhone on iTunes and choose “synchronise”). On your iPhone, you won’t be able to listen to your audiobook on iTunes, it will be in your app iBooks (which is much better because it remembers where you stopped the last time you listened to an audiobook, and starts from there).
It is very easy to do really, once one knows how to do it. Until now, I had audiobooks in iTunes on my computer but I hadn’t them on my phone and, as a consequence, was not listening to them often (except for those that I bought directly through the app iBooks but, as I am not using the Japanese store, there isn’t much choice).
Anyway, transferring an audiobook in mp3 in your library iBooks is simple and quick! No excuses to not listen to Japanese now!
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.
Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.
Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.
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