Rethink Audiobooks

[unisoft 311]

18 hours ago, Chyron said:

Poking around on the BBC website https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/category/audiobooks it does look like the BBC radio episodes do have separate descriptions on their website. It's interesting as they feel like separate but combined broadcasts. As opposed to an audiobook publisher/retailer that provides audiobooks in the same fashion that a written book is published.

Being from America, the BBC's method of organization for their content feels like the outlier to me. I can see the series/episodes connection when it comes to what they are providing. I still liken it to podcasts--they're just broadcast on the radio instead of exclusively online.

So the BBC is the world's oldest broadcaster, has the biggest archive in the world, and has either created or helped with many Broadcasting standards and codecs at an international level, working with international standards groups. I kind of trust that they get it right over anyone on here. So cannot agree with "outlier" statement at all.

Audible and others, simply have a continuous audio track in ONE file that contains episodes or chapters of a continuous story. Now, a quick flick on Amazon reveals CD Audiobooks (the original medium before digital). They still get published. Guess what? The tracks are individual for either a chapter OR an episode. Chapters if usually just one story and each track an episode if each one is a different story (or for comedy, different comedians in the next episode that was recorded on a different date).

So to recap, the way Emby does it now is correct in my book. If people have correctly tagged their m4b files, using "DESCRIPTION" metatag to describe the track/chapter and other embedded meta tags, then Emby picks it up and displays that along with year and other embedded ID3v2 tags. All of my 1000's of audiobooks are 100% tagged and with embedded cover art. I do not rely on realtime meta scrapers online and I have backdrop.jpg, logo.png etc in the folder layout.

What I will agree, is better support for those folk who have many episodes or chapters in ONE m4b file and how you play a specific chapter from the file more easily and to resume playback. I also would like to see the description tag under the embedded metatag "TITLE" when it shows the list of tracks so I can see what the episode or track is about and whether its the right one I want to play. At the moment  IN SOME of the Emby apps, you have to select a track and then you get a screen with DESCRIPTION shown. In this scenario, you have to go into each track from an Author/Show Title to see a description and that is bonkers and not user friendly.

Audiobooks ARE like music files (they are usually m4a files for most people renamed as m4b), except Artist is Author or Show Name, Title is the episode name or chapter name and Album can be used for Book or Series number. Meta tags for Genre, Description, Year, Copyright and many other ID3v2 tags are useable along with embedded cover art that can even be different on a track basis if required. This all works as of today in Emby. The wheel does not need to be reinvented. The LYRICS metatag can be used for Audiobooks to contain a lot more extra description than DESCRIPTION can hold too. I don't think Emby makes use of that tag. For music it's lyrics literally, but for Audiobooks can be used for extra description like producers, directors, cast, notes on production etc etc.

Edited May 11, 2024 by unisoft

[unisoft 311]

16 hours ago, Tremas said:

No, you certainly do not sound like a jerk! I agree with what your saying and want you to keep saying it. Please carry on. You are our best advocate for getting Audio Books to where it should be. I'm just suggesting you don't expand the scope outside of books until we get some progress. Radio Shows/Podcasts needs an entirely different rethink..

They don't need a different approach because if people tag correctly, the current Emby method works for all types. Improvements as I describe in my previous post, yes for getting to chapters easily if only one m4b file has many chapters or episodes put into one file instead of split into tracks. Emby could be improved using its "Suggestions" page that other libraries have for some of the "rails" that were in a screen shot posted in an earlier post to suggest content or resume content. Even if Podcasts were a separate library, it would still need underlying meta tagging to make it work and as they are still audio files underneath; they are all basically similar.

[sydlexius 259]

9 hours ago, unisoft said:

So the BBC is the world's oldest broadcaster, has the biggest archive in the world, and has either created or helped with many Broadcasting standards and codecs at an international level, working with international standards groups. I kind of trust that they get it right over anyone on here. So cannot agree with "outlier" statement at all.

Audible and others, simply have a continuous audio track in ONE file that contains episodes or chapters of a continuous story. Now, a quick flick on Amazon reveals CD Audiobooks (the original medium before digital). They still get published. Guess what? The tracks are individual for either a chapter OR an episode. Chapters if usually just one story and each track an episode if each one is a different story (or for comedy, different comedians in the next episode that was recorded on a different date).

So to recap, the way Emby does it now is correct in my book. If people have correctly tagged their m4b files, using "DESCRIPTION" metatag to describe the track/chapter and other embedded meta tags, then Emby picks it up and displays that along with year and other embedded ID3v2 tags. All of my 1000's of audiobooks are 100% tagged and with embedded cover art. I do not rely on realtime meta scrapers online and I have backdrop.jpg, logo.png etc in the folder layout.

What I will agree, is better support for those folk who have many episodes or chapters in ONE m4b file and how you play a specific chapter from the file more easily and to resume playback. I also would like to see the description tag under the embedded metatag "TITLE" when it shows the list of tracks so I can see what the episode or track is about and whether its the right one I want to play. At the moment  IN SOME of the Emby apps, you have to select a track and then you get a screen with DESCRIPTION shown. In this scenario, you have to go into each track from an Author/Show Title to see a description and that is bonkers and not user friendly.

Audiobooks ARE like music files (they are usually m4a files for most people renamed as m4b), except Artist is Author or Show Name, Title is the episode name or chapter name and Album can be used for Book or Series number. Meta tags for Genre, Description, Year, Copyright and many other ID3v2 tags are useable along with embedded cover art that can even be different on a track basis if required. This all works as of today in Emby. The wheel does not need to be reinvented. The LYRICS metatag can be used for Audiobooks to contain a lot more extra description than DESCRIPTION can hold too. I don't think Emby makes use of that tag. For music it's lyrics literally, but for Audiobooks can be used for extra description like producers, directors, cast, notes on production etc etc.

You're appealing to the BBC's precedence and authority in one area to claim they are a de facto authority in another.  They were neither the first nor biggest early mover of digital downloads and distribution of non-musical audio format.  There are a lot of people throwing out anecdotes of how they have their media tagged (or not) with "appropriate information", but even the largest plurality of anecdotes here don't amount to a hill of beans.  Your appeals to authority don't invalidate the fact that for those of us asking for improvements to the Emby UX for Audiobooks believe it can be done in a better way.  As @Tremasobserved, there seem to be two paradigms for presenting chapterized Audiobooks vs Podcasts and Radio dramas that exist across the spectrum of applications that are popularly used to download and consume such media.  Emby's UX doesn't seem to take this into account (IMO).  I appealed to the devs to look at products like ABS that do seem to strike a good balance (again IMO) between presenting books vs podcasts/radio dramas.  I'm sure there are plenty of other great examples as well.

As to your point about Audiobooks leveraging M4B vs M4A, that seems like pedantry.  Every audiobook, podcast, or radio drama digital release has leveraged existing CODECs and containers popularly used by music media.  The distributors of these media seem to be so satisfied with using what already exists when they could certainly have chosen CODECs better suited to voice-centric audio (ex: OPUS).  Even if the underlying headers and file structures are the same, the rationale with going with a separate extension could very well have to do with having a different extension handler and/or mode for apps like iTunes to handle/present chapter data in those files.

[unisoft 311]

14 hours ago, sydlexius said:

You're appealing to the BBC's precedence and authority in one area to claim they are a de facto authority in another.  They were neither the first nor biggest early mover of digital downloads and distribution of non-musical audio format.  There are a lot of people throwing out anecdotes of how they have their media tagged (or not) with "appropriate information", but even the largest plurality of anecdotes here don't amount to a hill of beans.  Your appeals to authority don't invalidate the fact that for those of us asking for improvements to the Emby UX for Audiobooks believe it can be done in a better way.  As @Tremasobserved, there seem to be two paradigms for presenting chapterized Audiobooks vs Podcasts and Radio dramas that exist across the spectrum of applications that are popularly used to download and consume such media.  Emby's UX doesn't seem to take this into account (IMO).  I appealed to the devs to look at products like ABS that do seem to strike a good balance (again IMO) between presenting books vs podcasts/radio dramas.  I'm sure there are plenty of other great examples as well.

As to your point about Audiobooks leveraging M4B vs M4A, that seems like pedantry.  Every audiobook, podcast, or radio drama digital release has leveraged existing CODECs and containers popularly used by music media.  The distributors of these media seem to be so satisfied with using what already exists when they could certainly have chosen CODECs better suited to voice-centric audio (ex: OPUS).  Even if the underlying headers and file structures are the same, the rationale with going with a separate extension could very well have to do with having a different extension handler and/or mode for apps like iTunes to handle/present chapter data in those files.

"They were neither the first nor biggest early mover of digital downloads and distribution of non-musical audio format. " - what on earth are you talking about???????? misinformation at best. Before digital, they released on CD as audiobooks. Radio Shows and Audiobooks were originally part of BBC iPlayer (2007) until broken into separate BBC Sounds later. You do know the BBC been operational starting with Radio since 1922, right?

Your 'better way' so far looks like a computer app UI. If I wanted a computer app UI, I would use such an app. Emby has to work on TV's using 10 foot interface guidelines. Other codecs are not universally available in devices like MP4 and previously, MP3. The codec is fine, its the bit rate they encode at that affects the quality that is subject to Amazon/Audible specifications.  HE AAC exists as an alternative is is fairly widely supported too.

Edited May 12, 2024 by unisoft

[unisoft 311]

15 hours ago, sydlexius said:

You're appealing to the BBC's precedence and authority in one area to claim they are a de facto authority in another.  They were neither the first nor biggest early mover of digital downloads and distribution of non-musical audio format.  There are a lot of people throwing out anecdotes of how they have their media tagged (or not) with "appropriate information", but even the largest plurality of anecdotes here don't amount to a hill of beans.  Your appeals to authority don't invalidate the fact that for those of us asking for improvements to the Emby UX for Audiobooks believe it can be done in a better way.  As @Tremasobserved, there seem to be two paradigms for presenting chapterized Audiobooks vs Podcasts and Radio dramas that exist across the spectrum of applications that are popularly used to download and consume such media.  Emby's UX doesn't seem to take this into account (IMO).  I appealed to the devs to look at products like ABS that do seem to strike a good balance (again IMO) between presenting books vs podcasts/radio dramas.  I'm sure there are plenty of other great examples as well.

As to your point about Audiobooks leveraging M4B vs M4A, that seems like pedantry.  Every audiobook, podcast, or radio drama digital release has leveraged existing CODECs and containers popularly used by music media.  The distributors of these media seem to be so satisfied with using what already exists when they could certainly have chosen CODECs better suited to voice-centric audio (ex: OPUS).  Even if the underlying headers and file structures are the same, the rationale with going with a separate extension could very well have to do with having a different extension handler and/or mode for apps like iTunes to handle/present chapter data in those files.

and yet you still fail to answer why the Emby team have to generate a load more work to make Audiobooks, podcasts and radio shows "Special" for you. By all means, as I pointed out some improvements can be made, but whether you like it or not, audiobooks are glorified audio tracks and Emby already can handle that - it just needs some refinement to improve it. Most of the time, people on here shouting the odds, because they don't tag their media. Mine is all tagged and Emby works generally well for audiobooks. I don't want to separate what you call Radio Shows because it makes no sense, I am quite happy to have existing genres for content types of my .m4b files. Many of those 'shows' are sold on Audible anyway - just combined into one m4b file (at poor bit rate) so American Audible are certainly happy for them to be labelled as "audiobooks" 

Edited May 12, 2024 by unisoft

[Neminem 698]

@unisoftCan you tell me how to meta-tag my audiobook series, so that I can create book series.

Without having to create playlistes ?

[unisoft 311]

"the rationale with going with a separate extension could very well have to do with having a different extension handler and/or mode for apps like iTunes to handle/present chapter data in those files."

and Emby actually works better when they are .m4b as well, as you don't then get recommendations from the MSUIC library and only other m4b files. It's just the container format for the codec. They could use the ITUNESMEDIATYPE metadata tag to determine if set to "Audiobook" (value=2) as well, but that tag was an Apple specific tag.

[unisoft 311]

29 minutes ago, jaycedk said:

@unisoftCan you tell me how to meta-tag my audiobook series, so that I can create book series.

Without having to create playlistes ?

I have series. It all depends on what you decided for your naming structure. Collections of authors or books are probably an area Emby could improve upon if you want to curate lists.

I use the ALBUM tag for series identifier e.g.  "Series 1" for Radio series. ARTIST is the show's name e.g. Dad's Army as probably more important as various writers used for each episode potentially and their names are not "famous" like a well known author is.

 

For AUTHORS who write BOOKS, I use an example as follows if it has multiple episodes to cover a story, Episode 1 here:

ARTIST = Agatha Christie

ALBUM = Miss Marple: They Do It With Mirrors

TITLE = Episode 1 (or an actual title for the episode if it has been titled by publisher, like "At The Vicarage")

DESCRIPTION = some description of the episode

LYRICS = production notes, cast names, producer name, extra copyright info, any special notes like technical source/quality issues. (optional field)

YEAR = YEAR of production e.g. 1992 (or the absolute full date and time if required.)

TRACK = 01

GENRE = Mystery

ITUNESMEDIATYPE = Audiobook (or some meta editors value = 2)

COPYRIGHT = Publisher copyright. e.g. 1992 British Broadcasting Corporation.

GROUP - Emby makes no use of this, BUT it could be made to specify sub-genres of the main genre

DIRECTOR - If you want to record the director name

Embedded covert art of 500x500 96 dpi

where I agree some improvement could be made is PUBLISHER. Sometimes, I have a BBC version and another version from another publisher of the same book. This bit does get harder as Emby can't use grouping by PUBLISHER tag. I normally use something in the ALBUM tag to differentiate at the moment.

 

I use MP3TAG application and initially setup the left hand panel with specific fields. This app is superb at handling bulk media changes and things like a tag field to filename, auto track numbering etc.

In the folder layout structure,  I typically have FOLDER.jpg as the show or Author cover art, with logo.png, clearart.png, banner.jpg, backdrop.jpg.

In sub-folders like books or series; I have FOLDER.jpg again specific to that book or series, a backdrop.jpg if I want one different to parent folder.

Edited May 12, 2024 by unisoft

[Neminem 698]

Ok so here is a series " The Cronicles of Ynis Aielle" containing 3 audiobooks.

Audiobookshelf :

Emby : 

Library and folders.

And meta tags

SO you are telling me I should break everything else to get Emby to work.

You are way off.

 

Edited May 12, 2024 by jaycedk

[unisoft 311]

12 minutes ago, jaycedk said:

Ok so here is a series " The Cronicles of Ynis Aielle" containing 3 audiobooks.

Audiobookshelf :

Emby : 

Library and folders.

And meta tags

SO you are telling me I should break everything else to get Emby to work.

You are way off.

 

I just use variant of music and it works for me. Similar to what iTunes, Audible and the BBC do. They are quite similar.

 

Yours looks OK, the only thing to make it work is I would use ALBUM/ALBUMSORT as "The Chronicles Of Ynis Aielle: Bastion Of Darkness". That's the only change I see. Your GENRE has two in it, but systems see that as one genre as you don't have a valid separator between the two. Again, a personal thing. You could have had just "Science Fiction/Fantasy" and that would be seen as two genres. Perhaps you wanted a genre called "Science Fiction & Fantasy" though.

I do agree with you in that, when you have sub books from one detective for example, it does get tricker.

I wanted to have AGATHA CHRISTIE as the author for example to see that in Emby. MISS MARPLE has many stories, and each of those is in multiple episodes for me.

This is how I did it by using ALBUM like "Miss Marple: They Do It With Mirrors", and "Miss Marple: The Body In The Library" - each of this stories can either have just one m4b file or multiple ones to complete the story as this format allows it and looks seamless in Emby. Which is why I am *mostly* happy about Audiobooks in Emby but do realise some improvements can be made as detailed in earlier posts...

Edited May 12, 2024 by unisoft

[Neminem 698]

Yes doing it your way is kind of a hack, that might brake down to road.

I will continue to use ABS

But thank you for the suggestions

[unisoft 311]

1 hour ago, jaycedk said:

Yes doing it your way is kind of a hack, that might brake down to road.

I will continue to use ABS

But thank you for the suggestions

The problem is, is that the tagging for mp4/aac is around MUSIC when it was originally defined. To use embedded ID3v2 tags for TV Shows, Movies and Audiobooks, you have to re-assign fields. There is no international standard as such on this, and Apple invented new tags for them to handle TV show media content specifically which I steer clear off APART from ITUNESMEDIATYPE because quite a few players recognise that tag.

I decided some years ago, that the compromises were minor over not doing this method, compared to some other techniques and is inline with what BBC/Audible and Apple have done overall if you looked inside a vanilla file that hadn't been altered by some DRM removal software. I have 1000's of files now and they play nicely in genre categories. Meanwhile, no standard has been extended/amended/created to fix the scenarios presented, and that is why the Emby team have a hard problem here and stick to the more Music tag way with re-assignment (like ARTIST=Author). Teh meta tag SERIES is not used really, BUT EMby could make use of that tag to satisfy both of us. It could work for both of us (and others).

Edited May 12, 2024 by unisoft

[Neminem 698]

Well i use m4a containers.

And emby is not recognizing Series tag or part tag.

Series + part tag should become a series in parts.

[Chyron 247]

@jaycedkCurrently, Emby does not support "series". It supports "collections", similarly to Plex. Collections in Emby are created manually, not from embedded tags (unless there is a plugin to do so, but I don't use that so ).  Also, Emby's collections feature uses themoviedb as a metadata source, so you have to manually fix audiobook collections to have the desired covers and information.

EDIT: I don't need someone coming at me saying there is a plugin for auto-generating collections, because it wouldn't work properly anyway since it doesn't pull from the proper local or online metadata sources for audiobooks.

Edited May 13, 2024 by Chyron

[Chyron 247]

On 5/12/2024 at 8:20 AM, unisoft said:

The problem is, is that the tagging for mp4/aac is around MUSIC when it was originally defined.

 

The SERIES and SERIES-PART tags are supported by m4b. ABS uses those tags because they are used by m4b-tool and Tone. In fact, ABS uses Tone as the tool to embed metadata tags. Or at least it used to. advplyr seems to say he's moving to just using ffmpeg, even with its limitations, because the scanner is faster that way.

Edited May 13, 2024 by Chyron

[Tremas 157]

This is to my previous point about supporting series. This is an important concept for audio books (but has a different meaning for audio series). That said, a good step would be to support the concept of audio book series.

MusicBrainz is by no means perfect, but it does have a defined higher architecture for handling it.

[Tremas 157]

On 5/11/2024 at 6:27 AM, unisoft said:

They don't need a different approach because if people tag correctly, the current Emby method works for all types. Improvements as I describe in my previous post, yes for getting to chapters easily if only one m4b file has many chapters or episodes put into one file instead of split into tracks. Emby could be improved using its "Suggestions" page that other libraries have for some of the "rails" that were in a screen shot posted in an earlier post to suggest content or resume content. Even if Podcasts were a separate library, it would still need underlying meta tagging to make it work and as they are still audio files underneath; they are all basically similar.

Yes, I agree that if you tag everything in a particular way you can get it to work. To me, emby works for these cases, but it is not elegant and could be so much better for representing a personal collection. As mentioned, this has to do how images are displayed for chapters/episodes, descriptions for individual tracks, display for series, etc.

For my personal use, I have two libraries set up: one for Audio Books, one for Audio series. The books are set up by to be browsed/organized by author and book. Series of books are handled with emby collections with view collections in line when browsing books. It works ok, but it could be better on a number of fronts including display, navigation, people, OSD, and all of the things that have been suggested over the years.

For Audio Series it is a very similar approach and use the audio book library type. However, in an ideal presentation it would be more similar to TV. These series would have proper cast and crew lists which would integrate with the People view used for TV and Movies. Want to see that Ian Holm played Bilbo in the BBC Radio Series - it's right there in his credits under "people." Want full episode descriptions with navigation and continue listening working like TV - it could be done, but it would be different from what you want from books. So while the underlying files and metadata would be a similar setup, I suggest that the library type for Audio Series should have a different display and navigation. That's what I mean by "rethink."

First step: utilize series and part tags for Audio Book file types, then get the display/navigation enhanced for books/chapters/series. That all helps Audio Series too, but then I think it's easier to convince the devs how an Audio Series would be displayed and navigated differently.

[Tremas 157]

Bumping this FR again - it would help for music, books, and audio/radio series.

Edited May 13, 2024 by Tremas

[Junglejim 379]

I'm sure everyone wants emby to improve with regards to audiobooks! Messing around with tags and folder names to get things to play nice with emby is a mess at the moment.

Don't get me wrong, been there, done that.

Once you discover a server app that just works (ABS), it makes it hard to use emby for audiobooks.

With ABS I can use Author/Book/Files structure (similar to music)..

@jaycedkhas pointed out some of the tags used here... emby is tag driven as far as audio goes, hopefully they can add more for audiobooks .

Edited May 17, 2024 by Junglejim

[Luke 38842]

6 hours ago, Junglejim said:

I'm sure everyone wants emby to improve with regards to audiobooks! Messing around with tags and folder names to get things to play nice with emby is a mess at the moment.

Don't get me wrong, been there, done that.

Once you discover a server app that just works (ABS), it makes it hard to use emby for audiobooks.

With ABS I can use Author/Book/Files structure (similar to music)..

@jaycedkhas pointed out some of the tags used here... emby is tag driven as far as audio goes, hopefully they can add more for audiobooks .

What is the problem with being tag driven for audio books?

[Tremas 157]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

What is the problem with being tag driven for audio books?

Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with being tag driven. I continue to suggest that emby needs to import and respect the additional tags mentioned in this thread (Narrator, type, part, series, release group, description, etc) and refine the UX to leverage this data. Many of us have already tagged our collections, but we need emby to import and utilize those specialty tags. Once these tags are imported the pages and OSD need to reflect the differences between audio books and the music library type. Yes, they can use the same containers and import tags, but the user requirements are different.

It doesn't need to be a complete rework from the ground up. Emby needs to properly display narrator, author, ("author" read by "narrator") for audio book media pages. It should not say "songs" or "artists" anywhere. Further, chapters should be listed as lines of text without the same image over and over. It should have navigation for book, authors, narrators, series, collections, genre, continue listening, next up (series), and other things mentioned here. The OSD should have chapter lists if there are chapters in the media (again, without the repeated images - just text). The tricky bit is to elegantly craft a UX that support books that are albums with individual chapter tracks and m4b files with embedded chapters.

My comments about audio series/podcasts/radio being a different library type are I related to my belief that they can best be displayed in a media info page that has a layout more like TV Shows with seasons and episodes and Cast/People instead of artists. It should include"people" as they are often tv/movie talent as opposed to music which are "artists." It can still be tag driven, but the UX is slightly different than music, tv, or audiobooks.

All of this is akin to how the music video library type is designed to have metadata for both artists and people. It displays navigation elements that support things like albums, artist images and logos like a music library but also cast, directors, descriptions, and an OSD like movies. It's a separate library type, but it's just mashup of two other types so it can accommodate a specific use case. That said, it shows images correctly and displays the important navigation and metadata correctly (artist, director, cast, year, release date, genre, etc.). Audio books needs more help than music videos at this point.

 

Edited May 17, 2024 by Tremas

[Junglejim 379]

2 hours ago, Luke said:

What is the problem with being tag driven for audio books?

Nothing, it's definitely the way to go! ABS is also tag driven.

You just need to support more relevant tags for audiobooks and add a scraper like audible.

Edited May 17, 2024 by Junglejim

[sydlexius 259]

On 5/17/2024 at 2:48 PM, Junglejim said:

Nothing, it's definitely the way to go! ABS is also tag driven.

You just need to support more relevant tags for audiobooks and add a scraper like audible.

That Audible part will be tough, as there's no publicly available APIs.  In order to get the audible metadata, a third-party will need to write a plugin to integrate with a third-party API provider like Audnexus (which itself scrapes Audible's sites).

Edited May 20, 2024 by sydlexius
proofread after the fact.

[adminExitium 259]

Just the tags support would go a long way. For the plugin, we already had a working implementation here, but it uses the Amazon website rather than Audible: 

 

[Luke 38842]

On 5/17/2024 at 5:48 PM, Junglejim said:

Nothing, it's definitely the way to go! ABS is also tag driven.

You just need to support more relevant tags for audiobooks and add a scraper like audible.

Are you referring to the part and series tags?