Rethink Audiobooks

[Luke 38842]

11 hours ago, Chyron said:

Audnexus. https://github.com/laxamentumtech/audnexus

How much data would you say it has?

[Jdiesel 1242]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

How much data would you say it has?

You can test it out pretty easily

Example query for the author Andy Weir

curl -s https://api.audnex.us/authors?name=Andy+Weir

Output

[{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"},{"asin":"B001JSBUJM","name":"Andy Mozina"},{"asin":"B004SUGGRE","name":"Andy Grant"},{"asin":"B001IGFL0O","name":"Andy Riley"},{"asin":"B006T2XHRQ","name":"Andy Puddicombe"},{"asin":"B001HPOALC","name":"Andy Croft"},{"asin":"B0034NFOFG","name":"Andy Seed"},{"asin":"B00MS8QJC0","name":"Andy Arnott"},{"asin":"B010JMUI0A","name":"Andy Skrzynski"},{"asin":"B088C1T6RY","name":"Andy Ngo"},{"asin":"B001H6PO9S","name":"Andy Hargreaves"},{"asin":"B00HW645KQ","name":"Keziah Weir"},{"asin":"B00FGVKKYY","name":"Andy Core"},{"asin":"B005I6WVBC","name":"Andy Bird"},{"asin":"B01CMOD7RE","name":"Andy Jacobson"},{"asin":"B07QJ4L6TV","name":"Andy Parker"},{"asin":"B07RRRC2B5","name":"Andy Erikson"}]

 

Example query for book Project Hail Mary

curl -s https://api.audnex.us/books/B08G9PRS1K

Output

{"asin":"B08G9PRS1K","authors":[{"asin":"B00G0WYW92","name":"Andy Weir"}],"copyright":2021,"description":"When the Sun is threatened by an alien microbe, the fate of humanity rests on the shoulders of an unlikely hero – and an even more unlikely friendship.","formatType":"unabridged","genres":[{"asin":"18580606011","name":"Science Fiction & Fantasy","type":"genre"},{"asin":"18580628011","name":"Science Fiction","type":"tag"},{"asin":"18580629011","name":"Adventure","type":"tag"},{"asin":"18580639011","name":"Hard Science Fiction","type":"tag"},{"asin":"18580645011","name":"Space Opera","type":"tag"}],"image":"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91vS2L5YfEL.jpg","isAdult":false,"isbn":"9781603935470","language":"english","literatureType":"fiction","narrators":[{"name":"Ray Porter"}],"publisherName":"Audible Studios","rating":"4.9","region":"us","releaseDate":"2021-05-04T00:00:00.000Z","runtimeLengthMin":970,"summary":"<p><b><i>Winner of the 2022 Audie Awards' Audiobook of the Year</i></b></p> <p><b><i>Number-One Audible and </i></b><b>New York Times</b><b><i> Audio Best Seller</i></b></p> <p><b><i>More than one million audiobooks sold</i></b></p> <p><b>A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this incredible new science-based thriller from the number-one </b><b><i>New York Times</i></b><b> best-selling author of </b><b><i>The Martian</i></b><b>.</b></p> <p>Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish.</p> <p>Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.</p> <p>All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.</p> <p>His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.</p> <p>And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.</p> <p>Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, <i>Project Hail Mary</i> is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival <i>The Martian</i> - while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.</p> <p>PLEASE NOTE: To accommodate this audio edition, some changes to the original text have been made with the approval of author Andy Weir.</p>","title":"Project Hail Mary"}

 

To get chapter markers you need to register a virtual audible device. This is when you would need to host your own instance of audnexus since it requires a user token.

https://audible.readthedocs.io/en/latest/auth/register.html

Edited December 5, 2024 by Jdiesel

[TeamB 2393]

@Luke

You should set up AudioBookShelf and have a play. That project has handled a lot of the requirements of Audio Books very well.

Audiobooks are becoming more and more popular, over the last few years I have seen a big uptick in people using and recommending audiobooks.

Emby has an implementation for audiobooks, but it feels like it is just a renamed "Song/Album" library and internally nothing has really changed. It even still references chapter files and audiobooks as songs in a number of places.

Simple things like not being able to set a series are a big drawback.

/Author/Series/01 - BookName/files here.mp3

Book series are kind of a must-have when organising your Book library.

I agree, metadata for audiobooks is sparse and hard to automate, one of the ways to overcome that is leaning more on the naming as an override, there should be an option in the lib setup to use the path more for import data, the above example

/Author/Series/01 - BookName/files here.mp3

The author, the series, the book name and series number are all in the path. You should be able to set the library to force using this data.

Some of the path options from AudioBookShelf

https://www.audiobookshelf.org/docs/#book-directory-structure

I feel over the next few years, audiobooks are only going to become more popular.

 

 

[Junglejim 379]

And Now for Something Completely Different..

[Junglejim 379]

@TeamBFor sure, Emby has to have a go! It's a bit hard with there current setup, which is do nothing and stick to the Artist/Album .. No room for series there...

For me personally, I use ABS as a server and series is a cool feature..

 

Edited December 9, 2024 by Junglejim

[Junglejim 379]

Can Emby do this???   I don't think so!  Not with there current staff!

Total free loaders... Cool lets make some money...

[Chyron 247]

I have said more than once that the Emby devs can't begin to understand the basic concepts of building Emby to play audiobooks if they don't ever listen to audiobooks. It's why they still haven't definitively decided that Narrator = Composer and Author = Artist.

Audnexus has been around for some time now.

 

I understand that there's a lot to manage with Emby, and certain bugfixes take priority. But it's literally been years since just I've started asking for this and yet this feature is still only barebones at best. I'm not even going to bother to confirm that the Play Queue still shows embedded chapters separately from split tracks at this point; I'll just assume it still hasn't been fixed.

Edited December 10, 2024 by Chyron

[user24 214]

1 hour ago, Chyron said:

It's why they still haven't definitively decided that Narrator = Composer and Author = Artist.

Perhaps Emby first needs to reconfigure Music because, in many instances, it appears that:

Composer = Artist.

Despite having separate Menu Tabs, they are grouped together elsewhere and there is no clear distinction between the two, where ideally there should be.

[Chyron 247]

Generally, Artist is considered as top billing (credited most prominently). If you've seen any audiobook cover art, the author is the most prominent credit.

Much music might indeed have someone as lead singer who is not part of the band releasing the song, but it is listed as "[Band] (ft. [singer])" where the band is still in the Artist credit.

Classical music is an outlier, assuming you want the composer and not the musician(s) listed more prominently---which, as I think about it, is still not usually the case. If you had a movie score by Hans Zimmer performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra would still be featured most prominently.

But again, we're still having this conversation despite a direct competitor (ABS), at least one major storefront (Audible), and a metadata provider (Audnexus) already deciding this.

 

Edited December 10, 2024 by Chyron

[Chyron 247]

It's a moot point really. They're not implementing this. If they were going to, they would have by now.

[Jdiesel 1242]

The sooner you accept that Emby isn't going to deliver the experience you want for audiobooks, ebooks, music, photos, or anything beside movies and tv the better off you'll be. I get the appeal of having everything in a single app/service but there are just too many compromises that need to be made to fit everything in. Not to mention the finite amount of development resources to do it. I host my audiobook and ebooks separately with AudioBookShelf and the speed and focus of development is light years ahead to the point that if Emby dedicated all their attention to audiobooks for the next year it still wouldn't catch up. The same goes for music as well but with music the alternatives are less clear. IMO the commercial services are just too good to justify hosting your own music so their isn't a market for it. If the commerical services ever switch to exclusive rights this will change though. Immich is my choice for photos.

Emby does Movie and TV well. I gave up expecting anything more and at this point I see any other media types as a development distraction getting in the way of TV and Movie improvements that we have been begging for.

 

Edited December 11, 2024 by Jdiesel

[Junglejim 379]

On 12/12/2024 at 02:54, Jdiesel said:

The sooner you accept that Emby isn't going to deliver the experience you want for audiobooks, ebooks, music, photos, or anything beside movies and tv the better off you'll be. I get the appeal of having everything in a single app/service but there are just too many compromises that need to be made to fit everything in. Not to mention the finite amount of development resources to do it. I host my audiobook and ebooks separately with AudioBookShelf and the speed and focus of development is light years ahead to the point that if Emby dedicated all their attention to audiobooks for the next year it still wouldn't catch up. The same goes for music as well but with music the alternatives are less clear. IMO the commercial services are just too good to justify hosting your own music so their isn't a market for it. If the commerical services ever switch to exclusive rights this will change though. Immich is my choice for photos.

Emby does Movie and TV well. I gave up expecting anything more and at this point I see any other media types as a development distraction getting in the way of TV and Movie improvements that we have been begging for.

 

Yep all jokes aside I think this is the way. ABS is in another league for audiobooks and there are other services that do a lot better in there respected areas (music/photos etc.).

Edited December 13, 2024 by Junglejim