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I like to listen to audiobooks, but if I sync an audiobook as music I get all of the "music playback" behaviour. My WP doesn't remember where I'm at - it doesn't automatically remove listened to tracks.

Podcasts automatically behave the way I'd like my audiobooks to do so, but I don't have a URL to my local hard drive that I can use.

Is there a way to sync audiobooks as if they were podcasts?

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2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

WP7

Yes, there is! Make sure the Zune is closed and simply change the genre property of the podcast/audiobook file to Podcast in any ID3-tag editing software (the screenshot below is captured in the foobar2000):

enter image description here

The main advantage of the foobar2000 is that it lets you modify a bunch of files at once. For example, if you click a right button anywhere in the Properties window, you can select Auto track number and it will put track numbers by the order they are located in the playlist (and sum it for you).

Zune has the tag-editing functionality too, but, apparently, changing the genre doesn't make it rebuild it's cache and recognize the file as a podcast.

WP8

I've looked into this and currently it seems to be impossible to upload/manage podcasts manually (might change in the future, if someone will find a way to read/modify mysterious SER files). Tried myself, nothing works, both genre and file structure are ignored.

Source 1 / Source 2

Tried accessing the device over plain MTP (as it was suggested in the first source), but after a day of troubleshooting, driver modification, compilation of several libraries and experiments I found out that my phone got two comm endpoints instead of three (required by the standard). My hope died at this point.

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Thanks for the answer. It seems very close. The only issue that I had was that the files didn't get synced in the right order to my phone. "07 of 22" to "22 of 22" were listed first and then "01 of 22" to "06 of 22" were listed next. Do you know how to get the ordering right? – Enigmativity May 4 '12 at 2:17
I don't know what exactly is preventing Zune from playing them in the right order (double-check the track numbers), but this seems to always fix any problem: close Zune, move files to directory outside of monitoring scope, launch Zune, make sure the files disappeared from the collection, close Zune again, copy files back to their original folder and voila! (maybe) – Olegs Jeremejevs May 4 '12 at 7:55
This, of course, only works for WP7x. – Will Feb 7 at 18:17
Updated for WP8. – Olegs Jeremejevs Feb 8 at 12:31
up vote 1 down vote

In regards to the lack of support on WP8, I have to chalk it up as a failure in planning. The official word from Windows Phone Support is that there's no way to get files that aren't from the store in to the podcast section.

Windows Phone Support Answer

If you really want this feature, for now all we can do is throw three votes at it on the official feature request site.

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