I just visited the forums again to for some more information and released I voted for this as well years ago.
I’d love to have my audiobooks centrally managed without having to copy them onto my dang phone as needed. At least its pretty easy on an Android, iOS very difficult to figure out.
Best solution for that is an App called Prologue. Logs into your plex server and either streams from plex or lets you download the book to your phone.
Does it do a good job of remembering position?
yes it does. You can also add bookmarks, adjust the speed of playback, add voice boost, put in a sleep timer, sync across multipe ios devices, search by author or title. it is really great. And it is only $5.99. Seriously, it is great. Here is the author’s redit forum where he takes enhancement requests and shows the product roadmap.
Thanks for sharing @tramp78. I’ll have to give it a shot.
yes, please, please, please +1 !!!
A massive +1 for me.
Proper audio book support in Plex and playback in plexamp would be awesome!
The Prologue app is legit. It is BY FAR the best $5.99 I ever spent. I am so happy with the app I donated on top of the cost because it is such a great app for audiobooks with Plex.
The ONLY downside…not available for devices outside of iOS which is really a shame.
Same here. My wife has MS and her eyesight is getting worse so she listens to audio books on Prologue because she has difficulty reading. Whenever I think about it I toss him a few more dollars for the impact he has had on my wife’s life.
Yeah, I just found out I can download audible books and convert them with open audible. These are in the M4B format and that means I can share my audio books with the rest of the family. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a rip off that I couldn’t share these books - some of them are quite expensive. So having proper Audio Book support (perhaps in the plexamp product) would be huge!
I’ve just discovered OpenAudible too.
I thinks its a great application and well worth the small cost as it takes away all the hassle of how to download your audible library and easily convert to a suitable format.
It gets some hate from people disliking that it’s paid, but the ‘free’ alternatives only handle the conversion and not
the download.
n.b, to note a bug has crept into the PMS affecting it’s ability to accurately parse and stream m4b files to Prologue/Chonicle/Bookcamp, but a fix is on the way…
I didn’t know plex even played them!
If I do a Google search for “Plex m4b”, it returns a thread from summer 2017 where reportedly Plex quietly started supporting m4b about then. I ran a search in the Announcements category for “m4b” and didn’t find anything; and any results for “mp4” make no mention of adding previously unsupported audio.
So it makes sense why you didn’t know, because Plex never told anyone. The only reason I know is because I randomly tried it (again) at some point.
M4B is just an extension and Plex has supported seeing m4b files since the beginning. Typically the audio is in aac format, which Plex has also always supported. Nothing’s changed.
Plex doesn’t support any audiobook features that m4b provides, but the files should be seen and playable.
We know its not because of the file type.
I would convert all my media to any type you want.
But please go one little step further and allow us to separate audiobook files in an own „Audiobook“ Mediathek.
So we can order them correctly.
Most of us don’t need perfect matches with an online service or cover search. Most of us need just an stash to organize our media. This should be easy to implement.
Audiobooks are not Books (as apple treats them recently) and they are not Music.
Most of my personal media are Radio Plays and i do’nt know how to categorize them correctly. Plex has an really big gap here. For years now.
Sorry for my bad english
Toco
I’m not sure what you are asking for isn’t already available and capable in Plex. You can add the audiobooks to a separate media library and use “music” as the type. Just a couple settings need to be different to get the metadata from the audio files and play them correctly.
It is more of a matter in having the metadata all squared away, kind of like what you would do for a music library anyhow.
The interface for audiobooks via the Plex app or Amp app sucks and isn’t really well suited for audiobooks. This is where most people use third-party apps like Prologue (iPhone), Chronicle (android), and others.
+1, I would also like to see this feature
omg… I just realized that this request was done in 2013 and we still don’t have it… the responsiveness of plex staff is really disappointing since this is not the first issue I’ve seen like that 
I beg to differ. When I first started importing audiobooks into Plex from my Audible library back in the day, I’m quite certain merely decrypted files (from aax to aac and inserted into an m4b container) were not initially playable in Plex.
I’m almost certain of it, because I’d been converting my audiobooks to mp3 for quite some time after I had adopted Plex.
If we have audiobooks which are split into multiple files, Plex will not remember what the last file in the audiobook album it was that you last listened to. If we have audiobooks which are combined as single files per book, Plex does not support embedded m4b chapter markers.
I highly recommend against having single-file audiobooks, because if you lose your place, then God help you—especially if you’re using a set-top box app to seek through the book to find your place again. In addition, Plex considers audio files at >90% progress as “complete” and will no longer remember your place. This is especially unfortunate for a single audio file that is 30-40 hours long (which means it would then not keep your place at <3-4 hours remaining).
