I use Plex for all my music and videos. I never sync my phone anymore. I just use plex sync. It works great for everything except ebooks and audiobooks. For eBooks I set up a calibre server, but I couldn't find an audiobook server, so I decided to try using plex. The main issue is that plex doesn't resume playback on audio files. It is difficult to remember how many hours into a book I am and it can be tricky to scrub through to the right spot. I saw someone on the forums recommend using quicktime to convert books to videos because plex does support resuming on videos, but converting all my books seemed cumbersome. I came up with a solution that works pretty well. I thought I'd share my results.
The process.
1. Instead of converting all my m4b files to videos I just renamed them to m4v. I did this manually with a few books just to test. A batch renamer or some command line wizardry could make this pretty easy to do in bulk. For books that are in multiple part I renamed them Author.Book.Name-PT1.m4v Author.Book.Name-PT2.m4v and so on. This stacks them in plex, making the book appear only once and making part 2 play as soon as part 1 ends.
2. Created a new TV Show library named audiobooks and pointed it at the folder with the renamed files my audiobooks.
3. Grabbed some images from google image search and some summaries from goodreads. There's not an auidobook scrapper, so info has to be entered manually. This step is tedious and unnecessary. I just like to make it look pretty.
Here are some screenshots of the results in the web app.
It says Audiobooks All TV Shows. It would be nice if it said Authors as it is a list of authors in my library.
Choose an author and you get the season view. A lot of authors I read/ listen too do series, so I'm using seasons to separate series. It would be better if I could rename "Season 1" to something like "Night Angel Trilogy" but it works well.
Chose a series/ season and up come the books. Unfortunately the posters don't show correctly because plex thinks these are TV episodes.
Here is how it looks on my phone.
There is one hiccup when listening on the phone. The audio stops when I close the app or close the phone. That is plex's default behaviour when watching videos. However I can click play on my headphones or swipe up on the home screen and press play to get the audio playing again.
It is working better than I expected. I don't know how difficult it would be for the devs to tweak the TV Show library to work better with audiobooks. A bigger issue may be where to scrap data from. The only imdb like database I know of for books is http://doghouse.bruji.com/I know nothing about making scrappers so I'm not sure if it would work for that purpose.
Anyways, I've seen Audiobooks come up a few times in the forums, so I thought I'd share my work around.
