I’ve installed Audiobookshelf but the iOS app (beta) still leaves much to be desired. There is no CarPlay implementation, server-side books (as opposed to those downloaded) have long delays to start playing and skip within a track, and I have lost my position in books countless of times. Plus, I don’t think its support for m4b is very good. I have built many m4b books and Audiobookshelf never seems to be able to find my chapters.
PlexAmp is very close to what I need. If they would add album-level resume and better m4b support I’d be fine with it.
the icons on the CarPlay app are usually black instead of white
the playback speed indicator in CarPlay doesn’t show the current playback speed, just 0x. Tapping on it does change the speed, but it doesn’t update and show the playback rate
starting playback is weird. When I hit play, the progress counter ticks up, but nothing plays for several seconds, then the audio starts playing and the counter goes backwards
skipping ahead (30 seconds) sometimes makes it jump to another track completely
if I listen in a other app like plexamp, prologue doesn’t pick up where that that one left off, even within a single track, although I can pick up from the Plex web UI
Having this as a library type would make sense for a number of audio file management systems;
Audio Books
Audio Dramas/plays
Custom Audio Files (white noise or audio soundscapes - MyNoise offers supporters direct downloads of custom audio files, for example)
While I am not sure if there is a database that would support scraping of data for these types of files, having a library option where we could set data similar to a TV series would be helpful.
It would be nice to add a specific audiobook library on plex with the saving of the position of Audiobook, like the applications bookcamp and prologue but directly on plex.
i have Audiobooks working fairly well in Plex, here is what I do:
Store audiobooks as a single m4b file (mine have chapters for when this is implemented in Plex)
add a library and select music and point to your audiobooks
install and select the Audnexus Agent for Audible it lets you select your audible server to match to make the matching of audiobooks fairly easy if it finds a match, the plugin also tracks your progress through the track (link below)
I find when audiobooks are stored as multiple files for each chapter there is a much greater chance of books being broken up incorrectly
if everyone can vote for chapter support I think this is the only missing feature I need… which is here
This works great if your books are single m4b files. But if, like most people, you have thousands of books that are made up of multiple mp3 files, it won’t help. All those people need is the ability to remember where in an individual file you are. Ability to match to the book would be great if PLEX want’s to create the plugin or new library type.
Yes this please, existing opensource Audiobookshelf is the closest, would prefer not to have to install another app service to have this functionality when Plex could do this seamlessly.
I’m not sure why this is taking Plex this long to develop. The structure is easy.
Author > series > book number - book title > file number - filename.ext
There is already a scanner for Audiobooks in the forum. The only thing Plex needs to do is to figure out how to pull out the series information from the scanner.
**There may be a licensing component I am not aware of for accessing a database.
I have already restructured my audiobooks using the structure above and have had no issues up to this point.
It looks like the earlier audiobook metadata plug-in might no longer be able to access Audible. Matching no longer works, either manually or automatic.
It could be a glitch but if not we’d have to find whoever is keeping a forked agent updated. The OG dev stopped development but it’s been forked. I just don’t know who is specifically is keeping it alive or if anyone really wants to.
I’m still using the audiobook bundle and this is working great for getting the metadata for each book. Where this falls down is with the series books. To overcome this, I am currently using the Collections field to add the series; unfortunately this does not put them in order for me, I may need to add something to the end of the sort for that.
