Support for audiobooks

[chyron8472]

@elan

I really do wish Plex had better (local) audiobook support.

Yeah, we’ve definitely discussed internally a fair amount. The conclusion was that it was likely something we’d like to support, but that there were a fair number of nuances around it which would make it less than trivial—some of the chapter-isms and different formats for books (file per chapter, file per book, e.g.) were non-trivial to handle well. We also wanted to find a good metadata source.

On the flip side, some of the things we’ve done in the new advanced audio player (silence compression, voice boost, pre-buffering) clearly help make audiobook playback even better too…

Regarding metadata sources, I think Musicbrainz (plus theaudiodb and fanart) should be good sources to utilize. The only thing holding back Musicbrainz from being the best solution is that it is community-driven, which means it is reliant on the community to expand and update its database. To that end, I actually have been updating Musicbrainz myself by slowly importing my entire audiobook library there.