Yeah it’s not a perfect solution all the way around, just the closest I’ve found after continuous searching.
I’ve found a couple more issues, the app doesn’t seem to have a way to automatic delete the cached items of things I’ve listened to, only solution I can see for that is to erase all cache after finishing a series or at least every so often. Automatic caching of things I’m currently listening to is limited to 5 chapters ahead, it is pretty easy to manually force it to get more though, if you manually select to download any chapter, it will automatically grab every chapter under it.
I’m hoping that since this is open source that some other people will pick this project up and maybe in the future we can see this as a real solution since Plex obviously doesn’t seem interested in giving us one.
So, I’m new here, fairly new to actually harnessing the real power of Plex and Audiobooks is one of the key things I want to use it for… I’m reading here about voting, but can’t as yet see where I vote for the feature?
I’ve sp far spent 8 weeks of the Coronavirus lockdown period here in the UK finally getting to grips with Plex and getting all of hour huge library of content into it and properly meta tagged and catalogued.
I’ve been a long time user of Audible and Alexa - a system that works beautifully together, but I’d so love to be able to access my Plex audiobooks on Alexa as I can now with Audible…
Please, Plwx - you have an army of people joining your platform now - years ago, it was technically too difficult even for someone like me who’s pretty tech-savvy, but this is an area you still seem to be sadly lacking.
To date, I’m paying for the monthly pass but looking to pay for the lifetime when I can afford it, but I want to see Audiobooks properly supported for the platform.
I still don’t count what support you do have for Audiobooks as a decent audiobook interface. I do load my audiobooks to my phone and use a player, but if Plex supported them well enough I could play audiobook on TV (Have screen saver turn on while playing). Sync/save current location and resume where you left off.
Having MP3/Audiobook support would be nice, but I usually create single files and add ID3 information for chapters.
I have audio books set up in Plex as music libraries. The library is set to ‘store track progress’ in settings. I paused a track in web browser then went to Plex Amp on phone, played and it resumed from where it was. You can create a smart playlist for your book(s) and order tracks by ‘Plays’ ascending, so played tracks will sink to the bottom, then it’s always just the top track that needs playing. You could filter out played tracks completely from playlist but you may need to go back to a played one if you zoned, which will be found at the bottom.
Artist = Author
Album = Book Title
Track = Chapter (or however it’s subdivided)
Library = Music + ‘store track progress’ +Scanner=PlexMusicScanner Agent=Personal Media Artists AlbumArt=Local Only (folder.jpg in Author+Book folder)
eg: S:\media\audiobook\kids\J K Rowling\Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone\1.01. J K Rowling - The Boy Who Lived.mp3
I use this naming convention for ALL music
M:\Media\Music\PlexLibrary\AlbumArtist\Album\Disc.Track TrkArtist - Song.ext
as it works consistently for all music, books, compilation albums. For Compilation albums I set Album Artist = “Comp Pop” or “Comp Rock” to group compilations together. It means they sort properly in file explorer and all info for tracks can be recreated from the folder structure. I also use artist.nfo + album.nfo files that are read in using my add-on + .lrc/.txt files for all songs. Plex Metadata grabbing is too time & bandwidth wasting + a bit hit & miss + why keep grabbing the same metadata every time you recreate your library (which will happen) when you can store it once with the media, perfect it then it’s there forever. I also do same for movies, tv, music videos using their nfo readers. Plex ought to incorporate nfo reading as Emby does. The code’s already been written for them, so why not!
“You can create a smart playlist for your book(s) and order tracks by ‘Plays’ ascending, so played tracks will sink to the bottom, then it’s always just the top track that needs playing/resuming”
I had a look at Pologue, looks great, good features, works well. Not sure if it updates the play point and number of plays on Plex server or if it keeps its own database on your phone. Will check.
That said, we listen on an echo show so web browser using playlist is only real solution. But there’s no denying it can have issues. As soon as you start playing a new file, though play count still shows as 0 it still gets sorted to the bottom.
Update, checked with Prologue on 2 phones and it doesn’t pick up where it left off so it must be using it’s own local database, which is a shame as Plex has values for play position and number of plays which would make it work across devices.
Interestingly I can set PlexAmp on phone to a music library, but still see playlists for audiobooks (from a different music library), so could easily use it for both, PlexAmp needs a timer function though like Prologue to stop at track end, or after n minutes. Maybe PlexAmp could evolve into a more book friendly system or be forked and tweaked into PlexBooks.
It creates a database on the local phone. Multi-device tracking (via iCloud) is in the works. This is part of iPad support which is also coming along with Author views. YOu can see the roadmap here… https://www.reddit.com/r/PrologueApp/
You can leave a message for the developer and he can answer your questions.
I don’t see why he needs to store stuff in a local db that could be saved/loaded from Plex server database like playback position and play count, unless there is no access to that from an app? Setting up own cloud service to do it seems a bit overkill. I’ll go take a look on Reddit though, and deffo try it out more, looks interesting.
With the new Plexamp App it kinda makes sense to add some support for this. When I first tried the app, I asked “oh do they have extra features for audio books?”.
It would add something extra for plex pass users via mobile!
Plex team should actually look into this request as now they have a separate music app. Even official support for remembering position, bookmarks and viable playback speed would be a good start. A metadata agent would be too much to ask for at this juncture .
