Given my personal interest in audiobooks, and the hope that Plex will some day soon properly support them, I thought I’d start a discussion about what actually would be involved and/or ought to be included in support for audiobooks.
First, it occurs to me that audiobooks may or may not make use of bookmark support as opposed to splitting chapters into individual files. I’m not sure if a library would be capable of supporting both methods simultaneously.
Second, given the above, it makes me wonder how tracks would be displayed. If an audiobook has one file with chapterized bookmarks, how would individual chapters be accessible by displaying individual chapters/tracks the same way a music album does?
Third, I would assume proper support on Plex would involve metadata scraping, but I’m not aware of any databases–outside of Audible itself–from which audiobook metadata could be scraped. For one thing, there is no (audio)book fanart community for custom posters.
…Just a little something that’s been on my mind lately.
I think the two primary ways to obtain audiobooks is on CD, which means multiple files, or via Audible, which I gather means bookmarked single files. I don’t think Plex can afford not to support both schemes.
The most important need IMO is to remember the last location, including which file, and to remember it for each book independently. That means, if I’m following 2 or 3 different books, it remembers the location in each, even if I switch back and forth, or if I go play music, or a movie, etc., then come back to the book days or weeks later.
Metadata scraping, if there is an online source, would be okay, I suppose, but given my experience with Gracenote, Last.FM, et al, I probably wouldn’t trust them anyway. The books I have are already fully ID3 tagged, so I would expect Plex to draw from that, just like it does for music.
I dearly miss my Phatbox. Nothing like it today.
I also have my books fully tagged and have preferred book and author posters included (or embedded) with my local files. But many book posters and (by far) most author posters I store, I had to personally photoshop for myself.
For one thing, Audible’s posters are usually low-res, meaning I frequently have to google for higher quality versions; and I would much rather have a poster for an author of a cover or character in their books rather than a photograph of the author themself. For another thing, book covers that Plex downloads scale to the longer edge rather than the shorter one, meaning much of any book-shaped cover is cropped instead of pillarboxed (unless you pillarbox them yourself like I do).
It took me a long time to find usable BBC covers for most of the Sherlock Holmes novels.
Also yes, Last.fm and Gracenote do a horrible job outside of finding a passable photo of, and a small blurb about, some authors.
@tusculumgolfer said:
GitHub - macr0dev/Audiobooks.bundle: Plex metadata scraper for Audiobooks
That Agent still needs a lot of work. For some reason it’s not prioritizing my tagged book titles instead of Audible’s titles.
There is some support for metadata scrapers out there for ebooks. Not totally what is needed for audiobooks, but at least the covers, summaries, and author info could be used. The Calbre application is what I am thinking of. It supports multiple sources of metadata and even supports plugins. Seems like the scrapers from it could be adapted. You would still be missing the narrator info and some of the graphics though. https://calibre-ebook.com/
