Firstly, I would like to thank the Pex employees for taking an active interest in this topic. I, personally, do appreciate this.
My circumstances for wanting an improved handling of audiobooks within Plex are (from what I have read in the comments to this thread) rather non-standard.
I have been collecting audiobooks for my media collection for some years, mostly so that as my mother’s sight fails, I will have them on hand in a format that she can use. Currently she is only classed as partially sighted and can use the Plex app on a tablet. How long this remains the case is yet to bee seen. Personally, although I am sure that the add-on apps are excellent at what they do, I do not actually want to have to rely on yet another app to access my audio books within my media server. I know that long term, the audiobooks will need to be individually transferred to a USB stick for use on my mother’s RNIB audiobook player.
Currently my “Audiobook” library consists of a mix of audiobooks and audio drams with a sprinkling of other items mixed in. I personally believe that the major difference between how most people handle audiobook type media and music comes down to the fact that you would not go into an audio book library and hit shuffle. While this would probably work OK for most music libraries, the resulting confusion would not be meaningful in an audiobook library. These would normally be played from start to finish, most likely with breaks in the middle as some of the “albums” can be extremely long.
Personally, I am in the process of transferring the files from the original CDs that I have. Until last moth, I did not actually have any audiobooks on M4B format, which would, from prior comments, be the preferred audio formant to most of those commenting. Taking the files directly off the original CDs I have a number of files per disc for each audiobook. This number ranges from a single file per CD to up to 99 files per CD (for some of those produced in the late 90’s). I also have audiobooks with between 1 and 20 CD in the book. This gets rather complicated to remember where in the audiobook you have listened up to as there is currently no way in the base application to see what has or has not been listened to.
I have come to accept that I will need to manipulate the files as I produce them to go into the current system in a meaningful manor and to ensure that different recording of the same subject material are listed as separate items. If is most confusing when the system tries to merge an audio book of Agatha Christy with the Radio Dramatisation as a single entity. Unfortunately, a large number of the audio books that I add to my server do not appear in any of the on-line databases at time or ripping and of those that do, quite often not all discs are listed. This will inevitably lead to items that will be difficult to correctly match data for, but hopefully not be as much of an issue if just matching basic information, such as author and book title.
What I would like to see mote than anything is for the main app to have a category for audiobook type media that shows what has been listened to and allows the user to continue from where they left off.
Beyond this, I would be helpful if the pool of “author” that was pulled from to match was largely restricted to just author, rather than the full pool of musicians that the current music system defaults to, to avoid autocorrection from a know author to an little know musician.
Please know that I am 1000% joking here as he and I discussed jumping in and being a part of this discussion up front. What I can say with all joking aside is that audiobooks are near and dear to my own heart and were the one thing I asked about in my first interview here at Plex years ago - when are we getting actual audiobook support?
