Convert Text to iTunes Audiobook

Since I’ve been all about lis­ten­ing to audio­books late­ly (actu­al­ly, for the past year — just more recent­ly of the fan­ta­sy genre), this link was pret­ty time­ly. Using some of the inte­grat­ed Apple ser­vices and some script­ing, macOSX­hints user miketyson put togeth­er a Ser­vice in OS X to sim­ply con­vert high­light­ed text to an Audio­book and add to the iTunes library. I gave it a try with a web­page in Safari (the Speech → Start speaking text ser­vice does­n’t work in Fire­fox) and the result was pret­ty easy to lis­ten to. The new Alex voice in 10.5 helps, though I don’t know if I could lis­ten to an entire book this way. How­ev­er, it’d be per­fect for those longer New York­er (and the like) arti­cles I nev­er seem to have time to read. It would cer­tain­ly be nice to have this Ser­vice auto­mat­i­cal­ly switch the AAC encod­ing to “Spo­ken Pod­cast” instead of hav­ing to switch to iTunes and change the set­ting man­u­al­ly. I’ll inevitably for­get to switch it back and end up with some real­ly awful sound­ing music files, no doubt.

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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