Audiobook issues on iOS 5 with Windows iTunes

I’ve received many emails about audiobooks not playing on iOS 5 for some users. The problems affect both the Music app and Bookmark and it appears to only affect users who upgraded from iOS 4.3 to 5.0 and are using iTunes on Windows. Since Bookmark uses the Music app “under the hood”, any tracks that won’t play in Music also won’t play in Bookmark.

I’ve submitted a bug report to Apple and I sincerely hope they are working on it. While there isn’t any single fix I’m aware of, here are some things to try:

1. The problem only seems to affect MP3 and WMA, not AAC-encoded tracks. To re-encode as AAC, right-click one or more tracks in iTunes then select “Create AAC Version”. It will create a .m4a track in the same folder as the .mp3. Annoyingly, you will still have to drag it into iTunes to add it. Right-click the original and click “Show in Windows Explorer”, then drag the .m4a file into iTunes. For good measure you might want to remove the old MP3′s to avoid confusion.
2. Because this only seems to affect tracks in “Books”, move tracks from “Books” to “Music” in iTunes then in Bookmark, go to Settings and enable “Expanded book search”. To move to music, select one or more tracks, right-click, click “Get Info”, then “Options”, then set Media Kind to “Music” and click “OK”. Expanded book search will look for any track whose genre is “Audiobooks”, “Audiobook”, or “Speech”. It’s set off by default because this makes the launch process a little slower.
3. Some people have found downgrading to 4.3 then back to 5.0.1 to work.

As always, I’ll keep on top of this and let you know what I learn.