Grouping series audiobooks on iOS

In prep for the upcoming post-thanksgiving road trip I’ve been loading my phone up with audiobooks. The thing of it is, we like series books, and they are always such a mess in the main book list. Why can’t I group them up like discs in an album? Turns out you can, if you know exactly how to tag them in iTunes.

For the sake of this example I’m going to tag The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a radio series of 5 different stories. Tagging is pretty simple once you know what to do.

• Set the “Album” to the series name, in this case “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
• Set the “Name” to the book’s name, our first book is “Primary Phase”
• Do not set the track number fields. If you do the book will display as “Part 1 of 5”
• Use the “Sort name” field to ensure the books sort in the right order within the series. I used “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 1” for the first book, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2” for the second, and so on.
• If you have a multi-file book that you can’t combine into a single file, tag “(Part 1)” on the end of “Name” and add a second number onto the “Sort name”: “Iron Druid 3 1”

When all is said and done, you’ll end up with a base list that has each series, and then within the series you’ll see each book as a “part”.