you can stop reading to me now, itunes

March 9, 2013 10:47 PM

I love listening to audiobooks as I fall asleep. I hate skipping around trying to find my place the next day. Is there a way to tell itunes to stop playing after X minutes (probably 20 or 30), so that it doesn't keep on keeping on long after I've conked out? The books are all on my computer in audiobook form (not as music, which I know itunes sometimes does), so I can't separate tracks into sleep-friendly playlists.
posted by tan_coul to computers & internet (11 answers total)

Yes, you want Aurora. It costs now, but the previous free version had basically the same features and might still be available somewhere.
posted by silby at 10:50 PM on March 9

I do the same thing. The Audible iOS app (and I would assume it's brethren) have a built in timer that automatically stops playing after intervals of 15, 30, 60 minutes, or the end of the chapter.

It's a life-saver, as I remember being in your exact same situation. This fixed it for me.
posted by ejfox at 10:52 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]

Aurora worked well when I used it eons ago; there's also a Dashboard widget with the specific functionality you want. (Not sure if it's still working, though)
posted by Maecenas at 10:53 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]

Alternate, free answer: press play on your audiobook, open up Terminal.app, and paste in:

sleep 1800 && osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to pause'

which will wait for half an hour then run a line of applescript that pauses iTunes.
posted by silby at 11:02 PM on March 9 [10 favorites]

Alternatively, you could set your computer to go to sleep after your preferred time interval.
posted by Phredward at 11:02 PM on March 9

What platform are you using? If you're on iOS, the default timer app will let you set a sleep timer. On OSX, I use iWannaSleep, but if you google Sleep Timer and whatever operating system you're using, you'll find stuff.
posted by NoraReed at 12:04 AM on March 10

You should be able to change the tracks from Audiobook to music so that you can arrange them into playlists. Select the tracks, right click, select Get Info and go to the Options tab. There is a drop down that will let you pick from Music, Audiobook, Itunes U, Podcast and Voice Memo.
Another option would be to change the name of a few tracks slightly to make iTunes split them up from the rest of the book. Then in the morning you can rename the ones you heard back to the original version. Use the Get info tab again and this time change the Album field or play with the grouping options.
posted by soelo at 6:48 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Discovering the "Stop Playing" selection at the bottom of the alerts picker in Clock/Timer was a game changer for me. (I realize you're probably on OsX not iOS though.)
posted by DigDoug at 9:17 AM on March 10 [2 favorites]

You should be able to change the tracks from Audiobook to music so that you can arrange them into playlists.

Maybe something changed in iTunes 11 (I haven't upgraded), but in iTunes 10 and earlier you don't need to even do this, you can just drag Audiobook tracks into playlists without changing the Media Kind at all.

Or, if the Audiobook is all in one track you can use the Get Info > Options tab to set a start and stop time for the track. So if you were 30 minutes into the track and you wanted it to play for an hour, you would set the the Stop Time at 1:30.
posted by bcwinters at 9:27 AM on March 10

If you're using a computer, perhaps you could set it to go into standby mode after an hour etc.
posted by AppleTurnover at 10:01 AM on March 10

You could do this by adjusting the Start Time and Stop Time in the properties (ie "Get Info") of the audiobook you're listening to. You'll find this under "Options".

Set the start time to where you left off last time and set the stop time to 20 minutes (or however long you want) later. This will also tell you exactly where you left off, so you just have to put last listening session's stop time into the start time next time you listen.
posted by urbanlenny at 3:01 PM on March 10