I remember back in the early 2000’s, audiobooks were not really a thing and were difficult to obtain and use like other types of media. In recent years though, millions of people use them as part of their media libraries like TV shows, podcasts, or videos, and are often used when visual input is not safe such as when commuting or doing other manual tasks. So, the market for these file types is huge.
Plex however, provides no special difference between standard music files and audiobooks, and ignores important features that are already built into M4B audiobook metadata, such as chapter markers for skipping back and forth if you lose your place.
This is especially important for blind people like myself, who rely on using players like the iOS Plex app to listen to these audiobooks, yet at times it’s so difficult to do so within Plex that it isn’t even worth it. For example, the slider control that allows you to scan back and forth within the book is not actually accessible when VoiceOver is running, making this an impossible feature for any non-sighted screen reader user to actually use within the Plex app. You can try this by enabling VoiceOver on your phone and attempting to use the trackbar slider on any music file to see what I mean.
Also, the Plex Server has a built-in percentage limit when it tracks the progress of specific sound files, so that it will not track the progress of any file beyond 10% of the total time length for that file.
This is fine for standard music files that may be anywhere from 3 minutes to 10 minutes in length, yet M4B audiobook files can be anywhere from 5 hours to 45 hours in length, if not more in some cases. The Stand by Stephen King for example, is 48 hours in length. This means that Plex will no longer track the reading progress of this book beyond 43.2 hours, after which it will always reset to 0% every time the Plex player app is reopened.
This is supremely irritating when you also consider that the trackbar is inaccessible using VoiceOver, and my only option for skipping ahead to find my place is to use the “Skip Forward by 30 Seconds” button within the iOS Plex app, and that I then have to tap this button 5184 times just to get passed the 43.2 hour boundary where I had passed reading the prior day.
I already know that the iOS Plex app is actually just a software wrapper around a web browser control, so it is actually impossible to make the trackbar slider accessible using VoiceOver, however there are a few changes that would significantly improve the experience for all people using Plex for this purpose.
- Remove the Plex Server 10% cutoff limit when tracking the progress of audio files that have an M4B file type extension.
- Add Previous and Next Chapter buttons for making it possible to skip between embedded metadata chapter tags within M4B audiobook media files.
If these two things were added, it would make it possible for Plex to also be a viable audiobook hosting service as well, and it doesn’t seem too difficult to make this type of functionality available.
As a nice to have, it would also be very helpful to have the option of creating an Audiobook library, filled with M4B audiobooks, instead of having to create another Music library just named “Audiobooks”. This would make it possible to have a tab at the bottom of the Plex app that actually said “Audiobooks” when tapped to find your book library, instead of having to use the “Music” library instead to find these file types, which is confusing because they aren’t music.
I have been using Plex for years, but I always trip on these bugs and nobody appears to be raising these things as issues, and the audiobook industry is only growing around the world. It seems like a good time for Plex to start considering these file types as their own media type category, just like all of the others already built in.
Sincerely,
Bryan Garaventa
