I’d really like to see this feature.
I am attempting to use plex to listen to audiobooks and have found it impossible because the app loses my position every time I stop playing it.
I would really appreciate this feature. It would make my plex server even more valuable to me.
I currently use Plex for my audiobook collection (over 100 books) and it works fairly well, though there are some quirks. For the one, you need to make a new library and enable “remember track position”. Secondly, as others have stated, this really only works if you store your audiobook files as 1 file/track (which is what I do).
Quirks:
- It’s not real “audiobook” support, meaning you have to endure a less than idea UX, such as using “artists” as your “series” and “albums” as your “books”.
- Sometimes it doesn’t “remember” your position very accurately and you end up resuming the book a few minutes off of where you actually ended.
To truly support Audiobooks, Plex needs to:
- Offer an actual “audiobook” library type, with Series, Books, etc.
- When you click on the play icon over a series/book, it should start where you left off regardless if there are multiple books in the series or multiple files per book. (rather than forcing you to click on the correct “track” to get the “resume where you left off” prompt.
- Have a audiobook metadata-fetch that can pull covers and other info in automatically.
That being said, the current solution is acceptable for the time being.
@DebrodeD said:
I currently use Plex for my audiobook collection (over 100 books) and it works fairly well, though there are some quirks. For the one, you need to make a new library and enable “remember track position”. Secondly, as others have stated, this really only works if you store your audiobook files as 1 file/track (which is what I do).Quirks:
- It’s not real “audiobook” support, meaning you have to endure a less than idea UX, such as using “artists” as your “series” and “albums” as your “books”.
- Sometimes it doesn’t “remember” your position very accurately and you end up resuming the book a few minutes off of where you actually ended.
Actually, you can use the album artist as the artist, and the artist as the series, so that you can preserve the Artist as the Artist in the library.
But what I do is label the book with a prepending series title, for instance, in my Jim Butcher series, the books are titled something like ‘Dresden Files 01: Storm Front’ for instance, or ‘Codex Alera 01: Furies of Calderon’, etc.
I’d like to echo voting for an audiobook library, and request that includes being able to playback at faster than 1x speed, like other audiobook apps allow you to (so you can have slow readers get through the book faster).
We need audio book support please! +1 on the first post.
Since 2 weeks I must drive with train to work and want to hear audiobooks on my way.
I realized again, how bad the Plex Android app work with storing the playback position in multitrack audiobook. After arrival I write everytime a note to myself, because the app can’t tell me what the last heard position was. But I don’t want to do this. A green hook for heard tracks on the tracklist, like in the app Booksonic, is enough for me.
At the moment I test Booksonic, Plex and Emby.
Emby have a audiobook library and it works very well, Booksonic ist my favorite for audiobooks. I can surely install every single serversoftware on my homeserver and use different apps on my mobile, but I have a lifetime subscription of Plex and I want to use ONE Software and ONE app for all mediafiles. Please Plex, bring an audiobook library with a working storing of the playback position for mutitrack books (singletrack is by the way not an option for me) and green hooks in the tracklist of the mobile app .
I agree. I’d love to see the audiobook support added to Plex. It would be great to use a single server/app for all media. Keeping track position is critical. Having speed adjustments and volume boost would be nice additions as well. Especially now that the Amazon Alexa can play Plex media, true audiobook support would be awesome!
We need more advanced Audiobook support. An official Agent and a Library Type would be awesome. It would help with issues like remembering playback location only sometimes.
I think the best way to make an audiobook library work would be to implement the following:
-
Scrape metadata from audible (there are 3rd party plugins that already do this)
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Treat audiobooks the way TV episodes are treated. This would mark individual tracks as already been listened to, and resume where you left off on a track.
I think those two things would be all you really need. Of course, you’d need to be able to sync that progress across multiple devices, and not consider a track finished if only 1min remains to be listened to.
I’m currently using Booksonic (a fork of Subsonic) for audiobooks. It works fine, however it does have the same issues I’ve experienced with Plex, which is losing your place from time to time. If we could finally get this feature integrated into Plex, that would be absolutely amazing.
@Pyrometheous said:
I think the best way to make an audiobook library work would be to implement the following:
- Scrape metadata from audible (there are 3rd party plugins that already do this)
I’m not really satisfied with the way this works. Sometimes the blurb from audible is super long; or it’s is more descriptive of the hype surrounding a book than the book itself; or sometimes the title is weird. I would like it better if there was a community-based database akin to thetvdb or moviedb from which to scrape as opposed to having to rely on Amazon for it. Now, if only such a site actually existed…
@chyron8472 said:
I’m not really satisfied with the way this works. Sometimes the blurb from audible is super long; or it’s is more descriptive of the hype surrounding a book than the book itself; or sometimes the title is weird. I would like it better if there was a community-based database akin to thetvdb or moviedb from which to scrape as opposed to having to rely on Amazon for it. Now, if only such a site actually existed…
I agree with you on that. A community based one would be ideal, or potentially just inputting it yourself for every audiobook (which is what I have to do with booksonic). Scraping from audible is just the best way I can think of that would be a quick and dirty way for the Plex devs to get audiobook library support up and running.
Just bought a lifetime subscription and seed to see this is not working correctly. 
Everthing else looks good so far though! So… +1 on this feature request.
+1 a definite nice to have
+1 on this feature request. Plz add it 
This is bloody ridiculous, how many years have we been asking this I’m sure it’s pretty simple code they had it for a video. Come on Plex this is really annoying.
Yeah, Booksonic is really the best choice right now. Unfortunately there isn’t the multi platform support available that Plex has. This limitation is partly why I’m switching from a Roku 3 to an NVIDIA Shield. Audiobook position syncing should be a simple thing to implement (I would think), even if we had to input all of the metadata manually.
@Pyrometheous said:
Yeah, Booksonic is really the best choice right now. Unfortunately there isn’t the multi platform support available that Plex has. This limitation is partly why I’m switching from a Roku 3 to an NVIDIA Shield. Audiobook position syncing should be a simple thing to implement (I would think), even if we had to input all of the metadata manually.
Speak for yourself. Booksonic does not honor metadata tags; does not like Author/(foldername)/Book organizing (eg. ../J.K.. Rowling/UK/Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, or ../C.S. Lewis/Drama/The Lion the Witch and the Warbdrobe); and getting it to pick a specific book cover is a chore. I’m not even sure I can get it to choose a certain author image.
@chyron8472 said:
Speak for yourself. Booksonic does not honor metadata tags; does not like Author/(foldername)/Book organizing (eg.../J.K.. Rowling/UK/Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, or../C.S. Lewis/Drama/The Lion the Witch and the Warbdrobe); and getting it to pick a specific book cover is a chore. I’m not even sure I can get it to choose a certain author image.
Author image doesn’t work (at least I don’t think it does), book image is easy enough though, just call it cover.jpg and put it in the folder with the audio files. I’ve been putting everything through MP3 tag, and mp3directcut to chapterize and tag all of the files after I rip them.
For example, here is my directory/file structure:
Here is how it looks from Booksonic web/server interface:
And here is how it comes up on my phone:
It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not as convenient as working with Plex for movies and stuff. I actually have to screenshot my progress after everytime I stop listening, because sometimes it decides to not sync the bookmark(s) correctly. But overall, it’s been a great way to stream audiobooks to my family. But it does feel unpolished in several areas.
EDIT:
I see what you’re saying, the subfolder being for genre/other tags. I typically tag those in the metadata via mp3tag, which Booksonic seems to be fine with, I use the subdirectories for series names:
Computer:
Web:
Phone:
@Pyrometheous said:
I actually have to screenshot my progress after every time I stop listening,
I got myself in the habit of doing this with Plex. If you have to do that with Booksonic, I don’t really see the point in switching.
I haven’t finished yet, but I’ve been adding artist-poster.png files to all of my author folders and poster-#.png to all of my books. I like to use images for authors of book cover art or characters, rather than pictures of the authors themselves.
Booksonic can not use my author images, and if it accidentally uses an image file for a book cover that I didn’t want it to, getting it to refresh its cache to use the correct one is annoying. Plus, I’d have to name the book folder what I want Booksonic to list the book as, and name them in such a way that they alphabetize correctly.
One more problem I have is that I have both the unabridged and dramatizations of Narnia and LOTR; both the US and UK audiobooks of Harry Potter; and both the Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow quintets. I don’t really want Ender’s Shadow to show up in Booksonic as Ender 6 - Ender's Shadow.
Yeah, in the end, Plex really needs to come up with some proper audiobook support. In general I’ve come to prefer Booksonic for audiobooks, Google Play Music for music, and Plex for Movies/TV. Booksonic has been the best at remembering where I left off, Google Play Music does a good job at if you don’t change to a different device or listen to something different. The on device cache is really good at remembering where you left off. But chapterizing the files, and taking screenshots has been my failsafe.
So I really hope that Plex does eventually come up with a robust Audiobook solution. I feel like no matter what service I end up using, it’s a lot of jumping through hoops to get everything working just right. I’ve thought about using audible, but the audio quality is painful, FLAC CD rips with direct stream options are the best I feel like I can do right now.
