Chapters don't work on Apple Books app on iOS

[designgears]

Not sure what is going on here, I have plenty of m4b files, the ones created with your software don't create working chapters when used in the Apple Books app on iOS.

Every other player shows them fine, even itunes and other apps on iOS.

[TheByteSmasher]

I tried to change chapter names on a file. iOS didn't see them (or any). Then I changed from "auto" to "always" for re-encode. That worked for that file but the chapter names were a little weird. A period prepended them.
My current issue is trying to convert MP3 files and after "generating chapters" I get an error

[designgears]

@TheByteSmasher thanks for the tip, that got them working, but similar issues, and all of the chapters are duplicated. 😄

[TheByteSmasher]

@designgears another thing you can do is change encoding (split? left on quality tab options) from parts to chapters (I think) then it'll make separate files. Then merge them again. That sometimes works also 🤷🏻‍♂️ This is great software, some files just behave funky.

[designgears]

@TheByteSmasher no luck, ended up with the same issue of duplicated chapters, only in Apple Books, it looks fine in everything else.

[designgears]

@TheByteSmasher found a workaround, in my case I have mp3 files for each chapter and I wanted them combined to a single m4b with chapter data. In windows I edited the properties of all of the files at once, used the option at the bottom of the details tab > Remove Properties and Personal Information > Remove the following properties from this file: > checked everything but # and applied the changes. Then I merged them all together again using your trick to force re-encode.

In ABC I used the filename for the chapter name and applied to all chapters.

The screen for chapters looks a bit different as well, something with allowing it to use the mp3 metadata for the chapter name is causing problems, but only on Apple Books on iOS.

With mp3 metadata:

mp3 metadata stripped:

Results with mp3 metadata stripped:

[TheByteSmasher]

That's awesome! Maybe @yermak can work with that to solve this issue without having to do all that extra.