Turn loose audio files into one proper audiobook.

02 · Podcasts

Or build one straight from a feed.

You can also build a book directly from podcast episodes. Search Apple Podcasts by name or paste an RSS or Atom URL, and Yarnripper loads the feed with its artwork, publisher, episode count and date range.

Filter the feed by date, season or title, then pick the episodes you want. They appear in the chapter list at once and download in the background, leaving you free to rename and arrange them.

Failed downloads can be retried, and export waits until every episode is present, so the finished book cannot have a hole in it. Feed artwork is used only when you have not chosen a cover.

If a show is about to disappear, you can preserve a season as one file that keeps working after the feed is gone. If it is your own show, you can offer listeners a single download, already chaptered by episode and carrying your artwork and credits.

03 · Export

It lands in Apple Books and keeps your place.

A folder of MP3s imported as-is can land in Music, lose your place and show no chapters. Yarnripper writes a proper M4B instead: it opens as an audiobook, remembers where you stopped and lists every chapter in Apple Books, CarPlay, Plex and Audiobookshelf.

Chapter marks stay accurate whether the book runs twenty minutes or thirty hours, and nothing forces you to split it.

If your files are already compatible AAC, Preserve Original joins them without touching the audio. Otherwise pick a profile by what you want from it: Compact for speech, Standard, High Quality for music and archival work, or Custom to set it all by hand.

Every export ends with a report showing the file size, duration and codec, whether the audio was copied or re-encoded, which chapter formats were written, and whether the cover and tags made it.

04 · Archive

Keep everything the feed knew.

Show notes, links, the chapters inside an episode and the chapter artwork all normally vanish the moment a feed becomes an audiobook.

Yarnripper keeps the source feed and show, each episode's original title and date, its show notes and links, and any embedded chapters or artwork.

That archive lives inside the M4B, with a readable JSON sidecar as a fallback. Other players still see an ordinary audiobook.

05 · Transcripts

It writes the words down, too.

Yarnplayer can search every word in a book and jump straight to the moment it was said, but it needs a transcript. Yarnripper makes one for any book you build.

Transcribe the current project, or use Transcribe Books to process a stack of finished M4B and M4A files. Save each transcript beside its book, collect them in one folder, or choose another destination.

Transcription uses Apple's speech recogniser in macOS 26 and runs entirely on your Mac. Every word carries a timestamp, so Yarnplayer can jump to the second it was spoken.

Each transcript is packed into a compressed .yarntranscript file that Yarnplayer reads directly. These files average about one eighth the size of the raw transcription. Import one and the whole book becomes searchable.

You can reopen a package later and export per-chapter SRT files and word timings.