I’m trying to organise my audiobook collection on Plex and I know this is a feature that still needs some love. I’ve got plenty of audiobooks on CD and I’ve ripped them all using fre:ac into MP3 files. If I place them as these folders onto my Plex server then each disc of the audiobook appears as a separate entry in Plex. It would be nice if it shows as one entry for the audiobook which you could select and then within that you could pick the CD or just the chapter to play. How is everyone else organising their audiobooks at the moment?
Plex has support for multi-disc albums.
You will need to insert the number of the disc as a meta tag into your files. This is a separate tag from the track number.
For audiobooks I have on CD, I merge them into a single m4b file and title each track as it’s appropriate chapter (assuming the tracks are split at the chapter)
There are a few different applications you can use to merge the discs/tracks into a single file, on macOS I use XLD, which automatically creates the chapter list for the merged tracks.
Most of my audiobooks are straight from Audible or Libro, so for the most part the metadata is already in the file, but if you’re ripping from CD’s you can use Mp3Tag as outlined in the guide or using any other editor you prefer (on macOS I use Subler. Mp3Tag is really good, just a bit too much for my needs.)
Whether you write metadata directly to the files or not, installing the Audionexus metadata agent is critical for getting rich audiobook metadata in Plex.
The last thing is which player you want to use. Currently, the native Plex apps are not cut out for single-file audiobooks. There is no support for m4b chapters.
There are several free and paid options for all device platforms. I use Prologue on iOS.
Most of this is discussed in the linked guide above.
