[Feature Request] Audiobook Support in Plexamp

Feature Suggestions
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  • If you would like Plex and Plexamp to support audiobooks don’t forget to press the VOTE button above

I am delighted by Plexamp. It takes us tantalizingly close to something that has long been missing from the Plex experience: Audiobooks.

I already use a third-party hack to have an audiobook category on my Plex server. I can stream these books on the regular Plex app for Android. I can even vary the playback speed, but it is no good for remembering my position in a book, a vital feature.

If I had an iPhone I could use the third-party iOS app Prologue, which is expressly designed to play audiobooks on Plex servers. Unfortunately, I only have an Android phone and many Plex customers are in the same position.

It would be wonderful if Plexamp could be enhanced with the following features to become a first-tier audiobook player:

  1. Variable playback speed, with finely granulated speeds, and tone adjustment to prevent the voices sounding squeaky when sped up.

  2. Intelligent skipping within a file - the number of seconds you jump back or forward with each press should increase the more times you press.

  3. Optional silence removal. I would use that for non-fiction audiobooks.

  4. Remember position, start playing ~10 seconds before the last stop position.

  5. Unlike other media on Plex, don’t treat audiobooks as completed if the listener stops less than 10% from the end.

  6. An Android widget, including a thumbnail of the currently playing item, would be handy not just for audiobooks but music too. People would use Plexamp more frequently if they had that visual reminder of what they were last listening to.

  7. Some users of audiobooks like using a timer so they can fall asleep while listening to their book. Freaks.

  8. Ability to add timed notes/bookmarks - terrific suggestion by @PMP in the comments.

If anyone else has any suggestions please add your comment below.

Again, thanks to Team Plex for this new app, I hope you will continue to improve it.

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Great list. Also another must have feature for me would be the ability to add notes. Timed bookmarks/notes.

3 Likes
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IMHO it is useless to waste a precious vote for this, before audiobook support has been added to Plex server in general.
So please back this request instead. Once implemented, the support in Plexamp will very likely follow swiftly: Support for audiobooks

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Hi Otto.

What I am encouraging here are specific improvements that could be made to the new Plexamp app to make it competitive with existing third-party Plex audiobook apps such as Prologue (which, sadly, is iOS-only).

While I understand the instinct to gather the votes of others for a feature request that you yourself support, it is worth noting that a vote for the request you suggest is a complete waste:

  1. While official Plex Server audiobook support would be welcome, audiobooks work just fine via Plex using the simple hack I mentioned. So, unlike some feature requests, anyone who wants to listen to audiobooks can actually do so right now and have been able to do so for many years.

  2. Despite currently having 1,156 votes and being the 5th most popular request of all time, in the almost 8 years since it was posted the Plex team has expressed zero interest in ever implementing the request you suggest.

  3. If you manage to take all 26 votes from this request and add them there, you will increase its score to 1,182 but its ranking will remain unchanged at 5th place. I suspect that won’t be enough to suddenly make the Plex leadership pay attention :smile:

  4. In contrast, this feature request is aimed specifically at the far smaller Plexamp team and is currently the 3rd most popular Plexamp request, a mere 9 votes behind the most popular Plexamp request, Android Widget for Plexamp, which is also one of mine.

So, anyone investing one of their votes into this request is infinitely more likely to see it adopted by the Plexamp team, and they probably won’t have to wait eight years either. Plexamp is a new product, the team behind it are audio-focused, and probably have more energy, imagination, and ambition than the team behind Plex server.

Furthermore, making Plexamp more useful for audiobooks will reveal to the Plex leadership just how popular audiobooks are and make it far more likely that they will think again about their decision, almost a decade ago, to decide against official Plex Server support for audiobooks.

I hope you agree that my arguments make sense. We both ultimately want the same thing, this is simply a smarter way to achieve it. If you agree, please remove your vote from that request and add it here.

3 Likes
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Do you know if Audiobooks are on the agenda?

3 Likes
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I doubt it. This has been one of the most requested features for eight years.

1 Like
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Here is a casual list of Reddit users’s audiobook playback devices I’m hoping someone on the Plex team will take a glance at. https://www.reddit.com/r/audiobooks/comments/s3shin/which_audiobook_players_do_you_use/
I currently use iTunes on a Mac to serve my audible (via openaudible) and library books (Overdrive/audio book builder) and Apple’s Books app for playback.

I’m thinking of making the switch to Plex but saw that audiobook support wasn’t really a focus for the company. I currently use my Mac as our iTunes server and a Synology for backup, but I’m thinking of building a Linux Plex server to keep track of the books I read. I use goodreads.com to keep track of notes, but it would be great if Plex or Prologue had basic listen counts, ratings & note taking.

1 Like
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It would be nice if there was a Plex App for audiobooks. I am skeptical about the idea of using a music player to play audiobooks. The feature sets required are different. I would prefer separate apps.

More to the point, at least for Android, there is a great audiobook app called Listen Audiobooks and it integrates with Plex well enough for my purposes.

Edit: Looks like the IOS world has an app called Prologue for Plex which would fit the bill nicely if it does what it says on the tin.

I would rather Plex concentrate on:
a) The server side because that is the core functionality
b) Players for Video and Music because of the need for an integrated experience with the server.
c) Getting Plex-served audiobooks into good audiobook apps already out there.

So this request does not get my vote.

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Based on their actual activity over the past few years, Plex as a company are focused on making the core server experience worse, not better.

What we are trying to do here is persuade the team behind an individual (and not particularly popular) app that there is significant INTEREST in audiobooks. We are gambling that if, at some point, the Plexamp project faces cancelation due to lack of usage, they will become aware of this interest and pivot towards doing some that we, paying Plex users, would find genuinely useful.

To give you some understanding of the level of interest, at this time (Jan 18th, 2023), the most popular request for Plexamp has 91 votes. This request, the 2nd most popular, has 81 votes. The 3rd most popular has only 6 votes.

So, if you are a paying Plex user, and you understand capitalism, and you see that serving the large audiobook market would make Plex stronger, and if you agree that it would be convenient for paying Plex users to not have to search for third-party clients to carry out such basic and obvious functionality, you actually should vote for this request.

1 Like
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I possibly spend more time listening to audiobooks than I do consuming any other media, and I have a fair-sized library of audiobooks, so I would count myself among those very interested in audiobooks.

But I also note that Plexamp currently lacks almost every key feature required of a good audiobook player, whereas there are existing audiobook players that have all those features and have “good enough” PLEX integration as well.

If the PLEX server treated audiobooks and other long-form audio like dramas, lectures and (maybe) podcasts as a specific media/library type, then it would make sense for Plex to develop a specialist audiobook player, whether that be added fuctionality to Plexamp or a competely separate app (which would be my choice). Audiobookshelf is going down this path, but it still has a long way to go, so there is probably a market opening there.

There is a very long-standing feature request for the PLEX server (rather than just Plexamp) on this below. If you want to burn a vote, maybe burn it there.

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While I am in no way suggesting you are cognitively challenged, you might find it easier to understand this feature request if you consider that it is requesting that the Plexamp team add features that will improve Plexamp’s existing ability to play audiobooks.

What this means, in the simplest possible terms, is that we want them to add the features required of an audiobook player. As you yourself so perceptively noted, those features are not currently there. That is why we are asking for them to be added. If those features were already part of Plexamp, this feature request would not exist. Feature requests rarely ask for features that already exist.

As far as I know, my other Plexamp request, for an Android widget, is the only feature request that the Plexamp team have ever made into a reality. I made that request because I and, it turned out, 186 other users wanted Plexamp to have a widget. Yes, we could have simply used some other audio player that already had a widget, but it was important to us to have a Plex compatible app, preferably one maintained and supported by Plex itself.

You may be thrilled with the Android-only app for AudioBookShelf but that will never, ever connect to Plex servers. They have a whole different system.

We Plex users are looking for something different. We would like the existing first-party Plex compatible audio player, Plexamp, which can already play audiobooks, to include the set of additional features that would make it better for audiobooks.

Whether the Plexamp team make those features optional, or have them only appear for particular filetypes, are design questions. All this feature request aims to do is to indicate, to the Plexamp team, the significant interest among Plexamp users.

You do not share that interest and appear to be using this Plexamp thread to promote an entirely different request regarding Plex Server, which the Plexamp team have nothing to do with. I can understand that you are excited about greater audiobook support in Plex Server, I would like to see that myself, but that is a completely different issue, handled by a different team, and is extremely unlikely to ever be implemented by Plex.

As it happens, if you spend five minutes googling, it is already easy to implement audiobook support on Plex Server yourself, so, the thread you linked to is pointless on every level, a complete waste of votes.

It also has no relevance to this feature request. Your confusion reveals that you understand Plex neither as a technology nor as an organization. My sincere advice to you is to spend less time opining at length, and more time on actual research and understanding the tools you use.

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Funny that you regard people who disagree with you as being cognitively challenged. I understand exactly what you are saying, and I am disagreeing with you because I think it would be a bad thing for Plex to waste their limited time and money on the requested feature.

a) I use Plexamp quite a lot, so I do have an interest in its development. Flawed as it is, it’s pretty-much the best tool out there for doing what it does - play music from both ones own collection and a streaming library service. I want to see its handling of music improved, and I don’t want to see time wasted on audiobooks because it would suck oxygen away from its core function, which still has plenty of room for improvement.

b) I think the idea of turning Plexamp into an audiobook player sucks. The UI requirements are just so completely different from music listening, and if you want to consume audiobooks out of your plex library on your mobile devices, there are already fully-featured player solutions out there. A separate Plex Audiobook player application would make far more sense than creating some kind of hybrid app that does neither task well. Even that makes little sense without a serious upgrade of back-end support for the media type.

c) As of right now, Plex is not a good server for audiobooks. It just does not have a good way of handling series, etc etc. It could be a good server for audiobooks if it recognised them as a distinct media type. Then, and only then, would it make sense for Plex to try to get into the market for audiobook player applications.

I’m not sure where you got the idea I was thrilled with the Audiobookshelf player. It is actually pretty bad. But the Audiobookshelf back-end does at least have metadata concepts applicable to audiobooks and represents a worthwhile direction that might one day be a good server.

Believe me I’ve done my googling to see how others try to bend Plex (and other servers) to handle audiobooks well. They seem to rely on having rigid directory structures and/or abusing ID3 tags by using them for things they were never intended for. Hardly a good solution because setting up your library for one server implementation potentially breaks it for all the others. That said, I am serving my audiobooks to my player from Plex quite happily right now.

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That is only partly true. The Plex Audiobook support is done via a third party toolchain, which is very hacky and sometimes does not work and relies on windows(lol) or semi-unmaintained tools that mostly come in docker(lol). (source: I have hundreds of audiobooks on my server) Metadata and matching is an issue without manual handholding.
You also need a third party player to have a somewhat pleasant experience. (Prologue is excellent)
So pms absolutely needs work to support audiobooks properly. If plexamp would make a good audiobook player, I don’t know

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Have you tried recently? The
audnexus bundle makes it far easier. Simply copy it into your plugins folder and the agent will appear. I wouldn’t describe it as a “toolchain”.

Of course, just as with adding any new category to Plex Server, you need to spend time setting things up in the way that makes most sense to you, but the installation itself only takes a few minutes (no need to restart your Plex server or anything like that) and this new agent works far more reliably than the previous best option. From your description of your problems with matching, I suspect you may be using the old bundle.

Obviously, native Audiobook support in Plex Server would be better but I believe there are political/legal reasons why Plex, the corporation, will never touch this. In the meantime, they enable customization. Pasting a bundle into a plugins folder is as easy as it could be.

A bigger problem for any Plex user is figuring out the best way to play their audiobooks. It is, of course, possible to use the various official Plex apps (Plex, Plex Web, Plexamp), but they will treat your audiobooks as music, which makes for a terrible user experience.

Most Plex users will never get as far as trying a third-party app and there really is no good option for the majority of the world using Android. iOS users have only two options, Prologue and Bookcamp, which has handed the owners of those apps a hugely profitable duopoly.

Plex, the corporation, ignoring audiobooks on Plex Server has handed that market to Audiobookshelf. Likewise, ignoring audiobooks on the official Plex players has handed a thriving business to third-party apps. Plex users are losers here.

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No. Quite the opposite. I went to the trouble of specifying that I was not suggesting you were cognitively challenged because I already felt bad for you.

Even if some random guy who blunders into a discussion is clearly a dribbling moron, I would never point that out. I am a very sensitive, caring man and you already have enough challenges in life. This thread is proud to be a safe space for morons.

To maintain the focus of the thread, I did have to point out that you had somehow wandered into a Plexamp thread to post about an unrelated Plex Server issue. I did not, however, want that to be in any way embarrassing for you. If anything, I hope you will come to view this completely unnecessary and pointless exchange as affirming and encouraging.

That said, I am serving my audiobooks to my player from Plex quite happily right now.

Thus negating the hundreds of words of blah, blah, blah that preceded your final line. Jesus.

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Yeah it’s much much better, I have been using it for some time now. But tagging the files with correct metadata before is still a problem that requires manual handholding in the matching progress. I did use some other (self hosted) hacky web app before for tagging but the name escapes me right now and I quit doing that, too much hassle.
Simply naming files correctly is, more often than not, not enough though.
IIRC it pulls author metadata from amazon, which can be a problem. I had a few authors that do not have an author page and one or two that had but audnexus failed to pull data, but admittedly it’s very rare.

Also audnexus can’t write into the collection field which requires manual intervention on every f**** collection.

In combination with prologue it gives a really decent experience though, if matched correctly. Still would prefer first party support for a streamlined experience and that requires server side support.

1 Like
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Actually not. I spent over a decade in product management of software products. Part of the challenge was killing off the science projects that detract from overall product quality/market readiness by defocusing the team and adding complexity and maintenance cost without attracting new customers. Given that Plexamp is a halfway decent music player that still has a lot of room for improvement as a music player, running off on a tangent to make it an initially half-assed audiobok player qualifies as a science projects and needs to be killed.

My mention of another development request was because I see that thread as an essential prerequisite before any audiobook player development takes place. If long-form audio support found its way into the core server, then it would make sense to develop a Plex first-party audiobook player. It could certainly go into Plexamp, although it might well make more sense to fork a dedicated audiobook/podcast player.

That said, I am serving my audiobooks to my player from Plex quite happily right now.

Thus negating the hundreds of words of blah, blah, blah that preceded your final line. Jesus.

Not at all. I serve my audiobooks quite happily out of Plex right now, into a good player that does not come from Plex. Half-assed support for audiobooks in Plexamp would add nothing. Adding a few features without a UI overhaul would count as half-assed.

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There are already 3rd party Audiobooks plugins for Plex. I’m using this works seamlessly.

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As i do understand your point of view I have to state that i find this statement wrong.
The app is amazing. If you separated your library correctly into audiobooks and music you can easily switch between the source. it works rapidly and amzingly.
the core functions like variable speed, sleep timer and skip several seconds are in there. and it works flawlessly. i really love using it. as the app in itself is just beautiful.

there is only one minor issue missing to a perfect audiobook experience. as there is an option to remember playback time. this feature isnt yet the ideal variant for audiobooks. for example when i doze off i want to be easily switching back to where i left off via a bookmark. furthermore when i switch my source to music instead of audiobooks my playback memory somehow gets lost. this also happened a few times when i entered android auto. this is a major issue for files with 20 hrs of playback. at the moment i circumvent the problem by taking screenshots to memorize my position just in case something goes wrong.

i really wish and hope that the bookmark feature can be implemented in the near future. this is the final missing piece to this beautiful application.

btw: the other third partys applications on android are horrible. bookcamp (costing 12 euros per year) is buggy and in a lot of times simply unaccessible as it wont connect to your server. chronicle also buggy and faulty. the only one always running smoothly is plexamp. therefore it would be ideal that the plexamp had all the features.

please do make the BOOKMARK feature finally happen! give us the missing piece

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FWIW, I have all my audiobooks on my PMS and I listen to them on Android using Listen Audiobook Player by Jared Bracken which has the ability to connect to and seamlessly download audiobooks from PMS.