On my system audiobooks are working quite well. I have a Fire TV that is 100% dedicated to playing audiobooks through my whole house audio system.
While I do not get any metadata that is unimportant as all I need to see is the title and author. I do not watch audiobooks, I listen to them.
I was one of the early people to request that Plex support audiobooks and they did take their time. But now the support is fully functional and only lacks the fluff that adorns TV, movies and music and that fluff does not impact the ability to listen to audiobooks.
There are bugs and limitations like the total lack of proper handling of FF and RW in large audiofiles but that is something that can be fixed. There is also the bug of the āendā of a book being sensed way too early.
I thank Plex for audiobook support. The only thing is that it is not finished, yet. Plex, in the past, has proven to be less than efficient at finishing features that they started but Plex seems to be trying to turn that around. With the new forums there has been better interaction from Plex and, maybe, there will be better follow through for the features that are only partially finished.
Is audiobook support perfect? No, far from it.
Do audiobooks work in Plex? Yes, at least partially.
I dunno how I vote here, but this is by far one of my most wanted features. I have over 200 audio books, and I also like to listen to music through plex, so remembering the file and positioning per album is keyā¦
I canāt emphasise how much I want proper Audiobook handling. Iām finding it difficult to store my entire library on my device, so accessing my plex server remotely would make life infinitely easier
This would be so useful. I drive 20+ hours a week, and it would be nice if the audiobooks would keep up with my traveling. I hate when I stop for gas, and it loses my spot.
Plex already has this feature and it works very well on all the clients I use. You just need to turn it on for the library you keep your audiobooks inā¦
Itās not useful if your audiobooks are not in single files. If your audiobooks are ripped from CD, as mine are, they are typically in dozens or hundreds of files. Plex remembers where I left off in the current track, but it doesnāt remember which track I was on.
There are many many tools like āMP3 Joinerā that are easy to use and join audio files into a single file.
I never said it was perfect but it does work and work well for me. My only complaint is that if you are close to the end it does not remember position and for many single audio files ācloseā could be as much as an hour or two remaining.
I do not normally use the resume feature much as I have a dedicated device for audiobooks (my Fire TV) and I simply pause the playback when I want to so the resume feature does not come into play very often.
Of course the Fire TV sometimes reboots or exits playback on updates so the resume comes into play when that happens.
Another real weakness is that the FF/RW functions are VERY slow and hard to use in most all the apps for audio.
Plex is far from perfect for audiobooks but it does work OK, at least it works well enough for me to use it regularly.
There is another alternative, maybe. I know this works on the Roku. I do not know if it works on any other platform.
First copy the audio files to another location. You do not want to try this on the original files.
Make a new folder structure that looks like a TV show library.
something like:
AudioTV ā This is the root folder for the audio library
____FirstBook
________Season 01 (Under here name each audio file in order )
___________FirstBook - s01e01.mp3 (This assumes that the files are mp3s
___________FirstBook - s01e02.mp3
___________And so on for each chapter
Once you have that structure rename all the mp3s to m4vs. You can also use mp4s but I use m4vs so I know at a glance which files are ārealā videos and which are just renamed.
Once you do that create a TV type library that points at AudioTV,
In the advanced tab set the agent to ālocal media assetsā so Plex will not try to use the TVDB for metadata.
Once the library scans you will have a TV type library with video files that have no video part so they play (As I said I know this works on the Roku but I do not know about other clients) with a blank screen.
If this works on your client you can play the audio files just like any other TV show. You will have full trick play and resume functionality and you can even turn on āauto play next episodeā and have that functionality as well.
Note: I just tested and found that this works in the web interface just fine and it seems to work partially on the Shield TV and the Fire TV but the resume seems dependent on having a video track on the Shield and Fire so it is probably not viable on those platforms.
Good idea to put the books in a show structure, but real audiobook libraries and support would be the best solution. Itās clearly important to people (451 replies on a five year thread. Seriously how does something like that go ignored this long???)
Iāve waited so long for Plex to create an actual Audiobook library. So far Iāve gotten by with the audiobook scraper, remember last position, and joining multiple files into one large, chapterized audiobook. However, a proper audiobook library with the following features would be nice:
Each audiobook, regardless of it being one single file or multiple files is represented as one ābookā.
If itās one large file, but chapterized, allow us to see the chapters, perhaps in the same way as how you see chapter markers in a video. If itās multiple files, the files become the āchaptersā
Each book should be able to be flagged as listened in the same manner as movies
Change the scraper to not save the narrator in the genre section. Perhaps create a narrator tag?
Create a series tag
A lot of wishful thinking, but I feel like a lot of these features can be borrowed from the video library.
Remember position works fine for me, mostly. However all my audiobooks are single files and just basic mp3s. I can exit and play other books or music and the position is remembered without issue. I have no idea if other formats work or not.
Also my audiobooks are played using my Fire TV or my Rokus, if that matters.
One thing if you get close to the end and exit playback Plex will mark the book played and close for audiobooks is often with as much as two or more hours remaining.
If you are using Roku you can change the extension from mp3 to mp4 and Plex will detect the files as videos with no video part and play them as if they are videos. The same renaming trick also works, sort of, on Fire TV and Shield TV but the playback is flawed and resume does not work. It also works fine in the web player.
Make sure you select play on the specific track, if you click play at the album level it will start from the beginning of the first track.
And as Elijah said, if you exit within the last 10% of the track (which with an audiobook can be a significant amount of time) you will lose your progress.
Yeah, I keep a merged version of my books as track 0 for use with Plex. I have the chapterized tracks as 1+ just in case things ever change. To get it to work, you have to select the track you were listening to, which can be difficult when there isnāt any visual cue on what tracks are in progress or have been listened to.
I just donāt think PLEX is interested in catering to people who have a ton of locally housed media. They are more aimed at cord cutters and such. So audio books are ignored, fixing music metadata (compoaers etc) isnāt a big deal.
