How long did that take? Can it be automated? I have over 6k audiobooks in my collection.
I don’t have much experience with photo/image editing. But I know PNG and SVG files can have blank/transparent spaces. The pillars on your image doesn’t match the Plex background.
And we shouldnt have to do this, plex supports posters in movies and tv, it would be easy for them to include that in the music category. Maybe include an option, for those who prefer book covers or cd covers.
This is why Plex should make an audiobook library type, simply copy the music library, and slowly make changes to it as they increase audiobook support.
As long as it takes to import an image, add an alpha channel to the current layer, change the canvas size to a square, and export the image as a .png. That doesn’t take very long.
Probably? I don’t know. I have no experience with editing images in Batch Mode.
I don’t understand that argument. What you’re saying is that your library is too large to be bothered with organizing properly. In my opinion, if you have a large library, then you have a large library and things take more time to organize. For myself, I’m particular about how things look. That’s why I use a media server for my audiobooks instead of Audible. I like my audiobooks to be split (or marked) by chapter rather than timecode; I like my covers to look pretty (and to not have that stupid yellow “only from Audible” ribbon); and I like to have my audiobooks sorted by author then series volume #. Doing all of that takes time. If you have a bigger library, then it will take longer. Yes, you could probably resize all of your images in batch, but I’m not sure how to do that.
The pillarboxes are transparent. So if it doesn’t match the background, that’s on Plex, not me. Besides, there’s no guarantee matching it to that background would also match it to every background on all devices. So again, that’s on Plex.
No what I meant is, doing it for 6000 images will take time, when it should work by default. And I’m extremely OCD when it comes to my media collection. All my audiobooks have a cover file, the MP3 metadata is all complete and follow the same standard. They all have the summary in the MP3 comments, all have narrator info, they all have genres pulled from Goodreads.
Assuming they can get goodreads to officially allow them to use their API, and that Plex would adhere to their terms. Developer Terms of Service. Also assuming they could work out how to populate an album with info from its correct release, of the myriad of releases listed on Goodreads.
I add mine to Musicbrainz for other people to use, I guess. And just in case I needed to use it for something like if my library in Plex/Emby needed to be rebuilt. …and because I can.
Now that Apple has broken up iTunes and made a hash of Audiobooks by not supporting external volumes for Audiobook libraries - I think this would be a great time for Plex to swoop in and save the day.
I would gladly pay to have a proper Audiobook player/server and I know Plex could do it. I am trying out Prologue which looks promising but I would love dedicated Audiobook support.
I add mine to Musicbrainz for other people to use, I guess. And just in case I needed to use it for something like if my library in Plex/Emby needed to be rebuilt. …and because I can.
Sure. But Bookbrainz is for publications. It probably prompts you to tell it specific information about a particular publication when adding one to Bookbrainz, just as Musicbrainz asks what specific release you’re adding. Because not only do authors use different publishers in different regions or at different times, but they also revise their work to correct errors and other things in the text.
Bookbrainz would probably not ask whether the narrator of my Harry Potter audiobook was Jim Dale or Stephen Fry, for example. And as such, it wouldn’t be optimal for Plex to use for audiobooks.
Have we seen any communication from plex employee’s that audiobook support is even being considered yet for PLEX? I recently used plex for an audiobook and it was a horrendous experience. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE start working on it. PLEASE…
Having the ability to pick up an audio file where you last left off, just like any video file seems like such a simple affair. I would happily populate the information and assign the cover image so if linking to a database to pull the specifics is the hold-up, please for the love of a good story, just roll out the feature. It would be nice to be able to go to one place for all entertainment. Pushing my vote for this feature!
I think being specific here matters, in terms of the work that will be involved in coding this. Also, it’s easy to say that something will be easy for someone else to do, but what’s easy and what’s not isn’t always obvious. What’s easy or not will be for Plex devs to tell us since this isn’t open source (and now we’re not able to create plugins for plex anymore). But maybe some Plex devs can tell us which of these are easiest and which are hard and what kind of work investment it would take to implement.
As chyron8472 notes, here’s different, specific requests that can be fulfilled individually:
So you should develop Resume at the Album level.
You should develop the ability for (resumable) audio albums to show up in “Continue [Listening]”.
You should allow a “Watched” (or rather “Listened”) Status to be set for audio.
You should develop m4b support.
You should add the ability to create bookmarks.
You should add Musicbrainz (or something similar) as an agent.
I think under the ‘develop m4b support’ is the request to allow m4b chapter tags to be seekable in plex. IE skip to chapter.
Solid recent clarification @Mercury00 .
Probably also worth noting that your list is also pretty well prioritized. (though I would probably sequence Album level resume third to track level “Continue Listening” and “listened” statuses)
FYI (for general population) - Existing plugin bundles can still be manually side-loaded by copying to the plex plugins directory
(i.e.: QNAP: /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/PlexMediaServer/Library/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins). However, very few still seem to work (but agents and scanners still work - to include the audiobook agent: https://github.com/macr0dev/Audiobooks.bundle)
Here’s hoping additional audiobook support is addressed soon!
