Baking Audiobooks with m4baker

Building audiobooks on (Debian) Linux in the m4b format is actually possible and doesn’t have to be a pain. I’ve found numerous recipes with shell instructions, but having a nice simple app to handle the building of the books seems much easier.

Most of the apps available for Linux seemed to be in a pre-alpha state, but after a few experiments I’ve settled on m4baker, which - while a bit rough - actually seems to do the job just fine.

Getting the m4baker running on my Debian Testing took a few steps:

sudo apt-get install python-qt4
 sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk-module
 sudo apt-get install faac
 sudo apt-get install libmp4v2-2
 sudo apt-get install mp4v2-utils
 sudo apt-get install sox
 sudo apt-get install libsox-fmt-mp3
 

Once these steps have completed successfully the final step is getting m4baker installed and running:

• Download the source from https://github.com/crabmanX/m4baker/releases

• Unpack the file and from the unpacked directory run the install script:

  python setup.py install –optimize=1

This should have successfully installed M4Baker and all the required files and libraries to build m4b-audiobooks (suitable for iTunes and other m4b-supporting audio players).

You launch  m4baker either through the (start) menu or simply with the m4Baker command from the shell.

m4Baker is an open source project available on GitHub.