Awe, cool or Things doing what you want without you asking them

If you rank music on your ipod Songbird transfers these rankings to your computer when you dock it.

Nifty.

Having Songbird watch for new music

Edit > Preferences
Media Importer > Watched Folders

Check the box next to "Automatically watch..."
Click on "Browse" and navigate to your music folder
or if you are keeping your music in your music folder, type :

/home/YourName/Music

where "YourName" would be your name...

Importing / Making Audiobooks

*for your iPod

Here are the methods, program and know-how I've amassed.
As you can tell it is to the point. There are two ways of doing this that make sense and are timely (sry Linux, no-go)

iTunes 8+ (XP, MAC)
http://aldoblog.com/2008/09/itunes-8-is-great-for-audiobook-lovers/
You're surprised, I know, I was too. They have made picking out the settings much easier (actually they do it for you and you just select Audiobook). Most importantly it takes all of the tracks from one CD and joines them together. It still lacks the concept that we might want chapter breaks (with pictures!), or that there may be more than one cd to a novel. So you get one big track per CD. Notably though, it remembers where you were in the track, and removes the song/s from your music (so when you shuffle it doesn't play).


Splasm's Audiobookbuilder (MAC only)
http://www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder/
This is why iTunes should have some kind of third party add-on ability like Firefox. This software looks so easy to use it makes me feel like I'm shooting myself in the foot trying to use iTunes or any other method. Just look at the prett picture below (you can even click the image if you want to view the blog I *borrowed* the image from).



*Heck if I can figure out where chapter breaks fall in, maybe it is on the CD or the case, I usually find them while I'm listening.