I’m pretty new to Plex, but I have such a great respect and curiosity for how this all works. If I’m not mistaken, couldn’t a person theoretically create a database with the metadata for an audio book collection and make an agent to read information from that database? I know it’s probably way more complex than that, but if anyone could elaborate, I would very much like to learn. Thanks in advance.
Yes, one could do that. Right now, audio book support is pretty limited just from a playback perspective. The metadata side of things is reduced to local tags. As best I can tell, from the playback side of things, gapless would be extremely helpful. Beyond that though, unless your audiobooks are all one big file, last position within a set of files is crucial. We finally have resume within an individual file, however resume from a folder of files or “album” doesn’t exist.
I think, once you see better support for the actual playback operation, then you might start to see more community support (i.e. agent) for the metadata side of things. Of course, that presumes that there is a place to retrieve it from and I’m not aware of where that might be. Probably some cludge rake of audible/amazon.com or some such.
Plex only added the absolute minimum audiobook support in the form of allowing resuming and ff/rw on some devices and it only works some of the time on those if you hold your mouth just right while standing on your left leg and holding you left ear with your right hand. It also only works correctly if the book is a single file. If it is in multiple files, even named quite reasonably, Plex is unable to handle it.
Plex is uninterested in audiobooks but they threw a bone, albeit a very dry one with little meat, to those of us that would like true audiobook support.
The poor implementation and pathetic support was done, I believe, more to try to shut some of us up rather that an actual attempt the support audiobooks.
An agent that imported metadata and artwork for books would be a good thing but it would only dress up the problem and not really solve it but it would be a good thing that might actually lead to more and better.
The poor Plex support for audio books has led me to setting up a whole house system involving a mini-computer running MediaMonkey and an Echo Dot connected to it via Bluetooth. feeding its output to a series of powered speakers throughout my house.
This arrangement has the advantage of allowing proper control of the basic operation of the playback via voice. Once I connect the computer to my Echo I can simply say “Alexa Play” or “Alexa Pause” and the book properly starts and stops.
BTW: Should Plex ever implement audiobooks correctly PMP or OpenPHT running on the computer can also be controlled via Bluetooth in the same way and you do NOT have to use the excessively complex Plex Alexa skill to get basic control. At this point I do not know if I would even switch to using Plex for my audiobooks should Plex decide to actually support audiobooks. What I have is working well so the need to move to something different is quite low.
