I know this has been mentioned elsewhere, but I wanted to create a thread specifically to garner interest for a new library type for spoken word content. I personally am not interested in eReader/comic book support in Plex since I think this is well catered for by other apps, but I would love to see Plex library support for audio books, audio dramas, radio documentaries and other spoken word content.
Audiobook usage is growing in popularity, and while Audible provides a good solution for some, many of us have ripped audio books from CD, or purchased them in MP3 format, and for us there still isn’t a really convenient way to manage them. Currently Android users can use Booksonic for this, though reports seem mixed, and as far as I am aware there is no current satisfactory solution for streaming audio books from your own server for iOS users.
I personally have a large and growing audio book library and syncing it through iTunes is cumbersome and frustrating. Plex could be an ideal platform for audio books, but currently using the Music library for this is unsatisfactory. A library type developed for this purpose would be ideal.
Specifically a Plex “Spoken Word” library would ideally support all, or at least some, of the following:
- When pressing play, it should resume from previously reached position automatically (and always remember where you got to)
- Playback controls for skip track back/forward should be replaced by skip back/forward 10s and 30s.
- Plex shouldn’t automatically mark an item as “played” at 90% complete like with movies and TV shows - audio books should reach 100% before it is assumed we have finished them
- Provide Metadata support for title, author, narrator(s), book series. (Book Series could be grouped using Collections)
- Ability to set playback speed to finer increments - e.g. 1.1x, 1.2x etc.
- Include Sleep timer to automatically stop playback at the end of the chapter or after a certain amount of time
- Ability to download an audiobook to the Plex mobile apps for offline playback
- Author biographies, reviews, cover art etc. pulled from online sources (e.g. Goodreads API)
- Prompt user to automatically mark item as read on Goodreads when reaching 100% (and add rating/review)
- Bookmarks support to manually save playback position
I previously tweeted @elan about this and he replied that due to the work involved, it wasn’t currently being worked on: https://twitter.com/saltedlolly/status/977590130205655042
With that in mind, if you would also like to see this, please ‘Like’ this post. The more votes we get, the more likely it is that the team will actually consider it.
