Splasm Software Discussions

Since I upgraded to Leopard, all audiobooks I created with AB refuse to show the chapters correctly. They are shown correctly on my iPod but not in the "Chapters" in iTunes – this stays blank.

Like I said, this happened only after I upgraded to Leopard. I never had any noticable trouble before.

Please help me, thanks!

//irulan

Interesting.

Chapters seem to work in iTunes with some Audiobooks, not others. We're testing now so stay tuned.

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com

Are you using iTunes 7.5?

We've found that we can only reproduce the issue with iTunes 7.5. And, we came across a couple of similar reports of issues with iTunes 7.5's Chapters menu:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... 4&#5769104
http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=211136

According to these reports, the issue can also affect Podcasts and Movies with chapter markers. We've also confirmed it can occur with the output from Apple's own ChapterTool. The trick to getting it to happen, in our tests, seems to be including at least one non-US ASCII character in at least one chapter name. the US ASCII part is hypothetical at this point, as we haven't had time for conclusive testing. However, directly overwriting the offending characters in the chapter name with something simple, like a US ASCII alphanumeric, with a hex editor cures it.

On a related note, thanks to the hunt we went on for this issue's cause we were able to squash a longstanding bug that led to some Chapters appearing garbled in QuickTime Player. Not a big deal for iTunes, which was unaffected by the bug in the first place, but good to have it fixed.

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com

Thanks for the quick reply, Keith! I figured it might have something to do with the latest iTunes update.

I checked my other ripped audiobooks and voila, you seem to be right. Whenever there is a international character in one of the chapters names, it does not display. However, if you have something simple like "Track 1", "Track 2", .. it works.

//irulan

I have tested this further and you seem to be right. As long as there are no international or special characters in any of the chapter names, iTunes displays them correctly (and quite beautifully I might add).

Is there a way to submit this bug to Apple?

I can NOT confirm this.

I just ripped an audiobook from CD and edited all the chapter titles to NOT have any umlaute or further special characters. There are just ASCII characters in the chapter titles now.
But still: in iTunes 7.5 the Chapters menu just contains one single entry, the name of the audiobook.

(Audiobook Builder version 1.0.8, iTunes 7.5, OS X 10.5.1)

Greetings from Germany,
Stefan.

yup: http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Stefan, can you pare down your test case into a small Project that you can compress and send to us at support@splasm.com ? We can build here and second that no multibyte character sequences are squeezing into the final output.

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com

hi

my iTunes doesn't display any chapters either (maybe a German iTunes "Feature"?) but the shortcuts and the control-menu to skip to the next chapter is working fine.

BTW: the problem exists not only for the ABB-Files, but for the Audiobooks I bought in the its.

Greetz from Munich
ric.

Hi Keith,

guess what: the error is gone!

I wanted to prepare a test case for you and started from scratch. And this time all went well (I watched out for the umlaute and replaced them).

So, sorry for raising some eyebrows here. Mea culpa!

Cheers,
Stefan.