So I guess some Plex moderator decided that “Remember position for audiobooks” and “Audiobook Library option” are the same thing, so I guess I’ll throw my vote here.
Now I just hope that the Plex devs will actually stop ignoring top requests and actually focus their attention on the most requested features rather than adding useless (unrequested) features instead (such as VR goggles). This, and similar, requests have been on the top for years, being ignored by the devs.
My prediction is that the Plex devs will keep ignoring this, and answer with a useless answer along the lines of “that feature is already added, it’s “remember position” in the premium music library”. The sad thing is that the “remember position” feature is a half-assed-not-working-properly solution, that doesn’t keep track of position over multiple tracks/files, but only within one track/file, and stops tracking position when at the last 10% or so of the track/file.
Add a audiobook library type where the interface is optimized for audiobooks, with the tags used for audiobooks.
I was about to write sorry for ranting, but honestly, I’m not sorry. This have been ignored for so long that it is the devs that should be sorry.
Plex is very much interested in locally hosted media. In fact locally hosted media was pretty much all Plex did for many years.
The problem is that the locally hosted media Plex is interested in is video and music and pictures. The other forms of local media, like audiobooks, is what Plex has zero interest in.
Plex is very good at only doing what Plex is directly interested in and it seems that no one at Plex needs audiobooks and I guess that they also have no family or friends they care about that could or would use an audiobook setup in Plex.
I have, as I posted earlier, a setup that works for my audiobooks BUT it is a kludge and has problems that have been well documented but it does mostly work.
It would be good if Plex took audiobooks seriously but they don’t so those of us that use audiobooks have to develop workarounds in order to consume what for me is a large park of my media consumption.
PLEX used to care about local media. But things like DVR and guides for over the air antennas have nothing to do with playing local media. My assumption is they think that is a shrinking market compared to cord cutters and that they already do the media thing well enough so why spend resources onthat stuff compared to the cord cutters?
As always Plex keeps their roadmap very private. I wish we could rename this feature request to be more generic as the things discussed within this thread have expanded way beyond what the original request was. I have posted in here in the past trying to summarise what I and others have felt important features would be and hopefully by combining the voting like Plex has will help highlight what the users actually want.
When I have discussed this feature suggestion with people at plex in the past they have assured me that improvements to the Audiobook feature is still on the roadmap.
Well, it’s nice to know then that the devs at Emby are actively working on implementing fully fledged audiobook options to their Music library type. I don’t know when Resume features will be added, but from the way conversations with Luke have been during the recent Emby Server beta changes, they’re looking into doing far more than just adding track-level resume.
Also, this suggests Plex is not directly interested in fixing bugs. You can say they said they were going to fix bugs in the recent “Sunsets” blog post, but that only means they’re good at (and therefore directly interested in) marketing themselves as fixing bugs, rather than actually caring about fixing bugs.
Case in point, how they marketed the idea of shutting down plugins because few people used it, only to then market the implementation of webshows (which is the same thing but curated by Plex, Inc.).
I imagine what they’re directly interested in doing is whatever Kleiner Perkins is interested in them doing, since Kleiner Perkins is by far their largest investor: Plex - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding
I suppose Kleiner Perkins isn’t interested in spending funds on development of local audiobook libraries, since that’s an even more niche market than local storage of movies, shows and music is.
Yeah, Otto Kerner steps on any new audiobook topics and points everybody to this misnamed, bloated, and shambling topic.
While this has wandered through a lot of points, and even includes a couple of band-aids, it doesn’t address the core point — that Plex desperately needs an audiobook library choice, with its own specific metadata agents and playback options.
Needs a subordinate library option as well, to catch the radio shows. Plex already has the podcast option going on, and both audiobooks and radio shows aren’t anything like a major step from there.
Until this is handled, our dashboards will be a disaster area in recently added music.
Plex also needs a mixed media library option as well, for those of us who do stuff like shoving documentaries into their own library. That, however, is another topic.
Plex has everything to stream media except the support for Audio Book. After the well known success of Amazon Audible and Apple iTunes, audio book has become very popular in many countries. Of course in English speaking countries, but also in Italy it has become extremely popular, especially because today an Audio Book is no longer a “cold” reading of a text, rather it has become a high quality acting with great actors reading the text. Both Apple and Amazon have high quality server and client platform to handle audio books, but both are limited to their own offer. Plex should not lose the opportunity to become the first platform to manage free and purchased audio book (typically without DRM) and protected (DRM) audio books from Apple and Amazon stores. For example I pay a monthly fee for Audible, and on my Mac I am not forced to use Amazon player to read the audio book, I can use iTunes as MAC OS is able to handle the Audible DRM (.AAX). Plex module for audio book should be able to do the same: for those users having the Rights, Plex should be able to play Audio Book with DRM. Certainly this is more complex to develop and it can be done as second step; initially Plex should offer at least the ability to play audio book without DRM. Apple (iOS and Mac OS) can recognized an Audio Book if it has extension M4B instead of typical M4A. “B” means that the file has DRM, but if you simply rename a file from A to B you get same result even if the file is without DRM. Once you have “B” the player recognizes it as Audio Book and enables the recording of any pause of your reading. Among many required features, the client to support Audio Books on iPhone MUSt have the simple GUI for CAR driving. just 3 big buttons: back 30 seconds, pause/play, forward 30 seconds. I wish to thanks sincerely Plex for their amazing platform and I hope that PLex will support soon Audio books
Please make this a priority. There are a lot of simple things that could be done to make this experience much better. #1 on my list would be keeping track of position past 10%. That’s SUPER annoying. I have a 25 hour book that still has several hours past the 10% mark.
I would absolutely love it if you would do this. I know you can’t honor all requests, but this one doesn’t seem too far out of the realm of quick development.
And you are surprised, why? Plex has shown zero (well almost zero) interest in true audiobook support.
However, right now, Plex’s audiobook support is a LOT better than the alternatives in particular Emby. Plex’s resume actually works while Emby’s does not.
Neither has decent support of FF/RW on any of the platforms I use.
I currently use Plex for audiobooks because of the resume support. I have each of my several hundred audiobooks in single large files rather than a bunch of little ones and all I really need is support for playlists, a folder view and resume functionality.
Currently Plex is the only client/server system I have tested that has the minimum I need.
