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Audiobook support


horstepipe

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  • 2 weeks later...
Chyron

I'd say the first thing to work on is to make clicking on the "Continue Listening" entry to effectively select "Play all from here" by queueing the whole book/album while resuming at the current track.

 

Currently what it does is only queue the current track, which is useless for track-split books.

Edited by chyron8472
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hobesman

I'd say the first thing to work on is to make clicking on the "Continue Listening" entry to effectively select "Play all from here" by queueing the whole book/album while resuming at the current track.

 

Currently what it does is only queue the current track, which is useless for track-split books.

 

This is true, and the converse of it: if you click to play the album, jump to the track that was last played, not just the first track in the album. Those are two of the 3 "must have" features I listed.

Edited by hobesman
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miniliQuid

added my votes to these ideas, do feel like these are pretty important features to have proper audiobook playback :D

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  • 2 months later...
Jbbrack03

I very much agree with the above statements. I noticed these things as well. It would also be nice to see what tracks from a multi-track album have been played when you select the full album. Currently I have to remember which track I was last listening to. It might also be nice to show some sort of progress bar below each track to indicate how much each has been played (in the complete album view).

 

Suggestions also need to be customized a bit to distinguish it from Music. In my opinion, a suggestion should be the next track or album in a series that has been played. Suggesting a random track from an audiobook or audio drama is pretty useless given that they need to be played in order. 

 

My last request for audiobooks is that it would be nice for the home screen to show the square album art instead of forcing it into a rectangle banner.

 

Example:

 

5ec01f9238d2e_ContinueListening.jpg

Edited by Jbbrack03
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henning65

I would also strongly support the implementation of a good audiobook support!

 

An argument which might be important to emby: There is no good audiobook server out there. I tested some - all of them lack substantial criteria. Emby could become the home of all these costumers!

 

My personal wishlist:

  • Distinguish audiobooks from music
  • Distinguish between the book-author (equivalent to composer (classical music)) and narrator (equivalent to artist)
  • make metadata for narrator ready for multiple entries (if it's a reading: yes most likely its one person - BUT - if its a play you have several people speaking)

 

  • also important: make metadata for book-author ready for multiple entries (some books do have more than one author)

 

  • nice to have: include additional roles: for example "director" (if it's a play you usually have a director)
  • nice to have: include a field "part of a series" (like books, audiobooks can be part of a series "Harry Potter"; Miss Marple; ....), if a field for "part of a series": also "no" within this series
  • nice would also be: Field "Date of record"; Field "Date (year) of Field "first publishing of the original book" (in the original language)

I do support wishes from others: especially bookmark handling

 

Yours

Henning

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negativzeroe

I would happily negate most of the fancy features above with proper progress functionality. I.e. when finishing a track, the next one queues in continue; having some sort of progress indicator in all tracks on mobile; not having to worry about not saving track progress in any given build.

 

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5000 using Tapatalk

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Jbbrack03

I would happily negate most of the fancy features above with proper progress functionality. I.e. when finishing a track, the next one queues in continue; having some sort of progress indicator in all tracks on mobile; not having to worry about not saving track progress in any given build.

 

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5000 using Tapatalk

 

I would agree. If they had to pick just one thing to fix quickly, this would be it. It's very difficult to keep track of where I am on multi track audiobooks. I would be a functional system with just this one thing fixed. It can definitely be even better with some of the suggestions in other posts, but this is the big one.

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  • 1 month later...
Chyron

@Luke Has there been any progress with regard to implementing audiobooks?

Seriously, the primary things that are lacking are for Continue Listening to queue the whole book, and for a book's Album page to have a Resume button that remembers which track was last played.

Other possible additions are quality-of-life improvements, but without those two things it's nearly unusable.

Edited by Chyron
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Gilgamesh_48
On 7/20/2020 at 2:28 PM, Luke said:

Not yet but hopefully soon. Thanks for the feedback.

I think I have asked before but which "soon." 

Is it soon as it applies to the universe or soon as it applies to a mountain or soon as it applies to the phases of the moon or soon as it applies to the hours on a clock or soon as it is perceived by those uttering "are we there yet."

I know there is a very strong reluctance to nail down a delivery date for any project but "soon" is really quite ambiguous as far as setting a time frame for reasonable expectations.

Inquiring minds want to know the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 🤨😜🤣

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25 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

Is it soon as it applies to the universe or soon as it applies to a mountain or soon as it applies to the phases of the moon or soon as it applies to the hours on a clock or soon as it is perceived by those uttering "are we there yet."

I know there is a very strong reluctance to nail down a delivery date for any project but "soon" is really quite ambiguous as far as setting a time frame for reasonable expectations.

Nah, I think you got it all wrong, let me see if I can help,

Soon is like tomorrow, but in 24 hours, it's still not tomorrow as it will then be today. But since you know it'll be done tomorrow you can rest assured, since told yesterday that tomorrow it will be released.  Of course that might give you a headache today thinking about it, but at least tomorrow it's yesterday's problem.  LOL

I know nothing about the release time frame but typically when you get a "soon" from Luke it's in the pipeline in some measurable way and not and idea or something planned for the future. 

Don't know how much help this was but you could check back soon for an update. :)

Hope my sense of humor doesn't offend anyone!

Edited by cayars
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Gilgamesh_48
1 hour ago, cayars said:

Hope my sense of humor doesn't offend anyone!

I am offended! ☺️ I am offended that you came up with a more ambiguous and less precise definition than I did. Also I am offended that your example was funnier than mine.

So you have doubly offended me. 🤪 I doubt you can ever live down such offensive behavior. 😜

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Jbbrack03

I do think that they're working on it, and I think that they get that it's a big feature that will be meaningful to a large part of their customer base. It has to be done right, and they'll need to nail down these features. So for my part I hope that they take their time and really come out with something great. I'm really excited for it to come yesterday to, but I want it to be magical when it finally does arrive.

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Gilgamesh_48
9 minutes ago, Jbbrack03 said:

I do think that they're working on it, and I think that they get that it's a big feature that will be meaningful to a large part of their customer base. It has to be done right, and they'll need to nail down these features. So for my part I hope that they take their time and really come out with something great. I'm really excited for it to come yesterday to, but I want it to be magical when it finally does arrive.

Actually all I need is a reliable ff/rw/resume and the ability to browse by files and/or folders. I know Emby want to present this with all the bells and whistles and full metadata but while that might be nice it is important to me. I just want the ability to find and correctly play my audio books. Or they could just develop a MediaMonkey plugin that plays files from a MediaMonkey library.

For me what they have now is perfectly acceptable if resume/ff/rw worked correctly.

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12 hours ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

Actually all I need is a reliable ff/rw/resume and the ability to browse by files and/or folders.

Does the current functionality in the Android TV app give you the basics you need?

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Gilgamesh_48
10 minutes ago, ebr said:

Does the current functionality in the Android TV app give you the basics you need?

Yes. But I usually use Roku. But honestly Roku's functionality for this is limited because they force any app to exit if there is no activity after a period of time. That is if I try to use a Roku as an audio book player and I start a book and then later pause it and after an hour or so I want to resume listening I have to re-open whatever app I use and navigate to the book and restart it. Even if the Emby for Roku was fully functional for audio books I doubt it would be usable for my purposes in playing audio books. The problem with using the Android apps for audio books is that the Android devices I have do not have a separate audio output and i do not "watch" audio books I listen to them so an HDMI output is not what I need. I guess I am going to withdraw my request for proper audio book support on the Roku because it just does not work for me because of Roku's limitations not Embys.

I am going to test my older Fire TV box to see if its Emby app will do the job but the Fire is not fully Android so it may or may not work and I do not remember for sure if it has a real audio output I'll see.

Thank you for forcing me to think along more correct lines.

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Actually, if the Roku is "playing the audio" and you happen to pause. This will last forever. Because there is content shown to the audio player and because the state of the player is paused the Roku will not be able to exit. This will make the beacons keep sending when the audio is playing or paused. As long as those beacons continue to send on your Roku it will not send the terminate/exit to the app.

You might be able to consider Roku once we get there with audio books. It is indeed possible to pause and stay within the app forever. I know because in doing work on the audio player I can keep things paused indefinitely. Screen saver comes up. After come back from screen saver there is the exact song I was playing paused exactly as I left it. ;)

Edited by speechles
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Gilgamesh_48
1 hour ago, speechles said:

Actually, if the Roku is "playing the audio" and you happen to pause. This will last forever. Because there is content shown to the audio player and because the state of the player is paused the Roku will not be able to exit. This will make the beacons keep sending when the audio is playing or paused. As long as those beacons continue to send on your Roku it will not send the terminate/exit to the app.

You might be able to consider Roku once we get there with audio books. It is indeed possible to pause and stay within the app forever. I know because in doing work on the audio player I can keep things paused indefinitely. Screen saver comes up. After come back from screen saver there is the exact song I was playing paused exactly as I left it. ;)

So audio is treated differently by Roku than video. That did not used to be the case way back when I was using Plex for audio books just because audio playback was one of the few things Plex did right. For almost a year I used a Roku and Plex to play audio on my whole house system and then suddenly the paused audio was exiting unexpectedly. I checked on the Roku forums and found that anything paused would exit after a little time. They made a firmware change that added that "feature" to help ruin my experience Does this now mean that Roku backed off a little or are you doing something different from what Plex did way back then or was it a change to the API or some such that now treats paused audio correctly?

It does not really matter much but it would be convenient for me to be able to play my audio books through a Roku I just happen to have laying around. It is a Roku 3 and it has the audio out I need for my whole house system. I discovered that my Fire TV does not have regular audio out but it does have optical and I think I have an optical to regular stereo converter laying around so that remains a possibility as well.

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The way we handle audio and video we pass beacons to the Roku unit to let it know what we are doing. Roku recently made all applications do this but we have been doing it for quite some time. I have left a video paused on my Roku TV overnight. Have done the same with music on a different Roku TV at the same time. I leave it the way it is and come back to it to finish and it has never exited the application unless it is not playing video or music. If you are idled on the Emby Roku app and an update to the Emby Roku app appears it will seek that update. That is what exits back to the home screen. The automatic update of the Emby app while the unit was either on the screen saver or an otherwise inactive device. Even though the screen saver can appear over audio and video the beacons prevent it from updating.

The Roku STB should behave the same way now that beacons are forced upon us all.

Edited by speechles
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  • 1 month later...
horstepipe

So playback speed adjustment, which is a feature mainly used for audio books i guess, is implemented now in 4.5.0.50. What's the state of resuming? I read somewhere that there where first steps on the android app? Will we get to it soon?

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  • 1 month later...
runtimesandbox

One of the big things for me at the moment is that clicking the Audiobooks library takes you to "Suggestions" (I can't seem to find a way to change this?). Suggestions has a list of books but if you click one, rather than take you to the start, it takes you straight to a random chapter with no obvious way to get to the start of the book.

image.png.6779f1771f6cfaa8926363245f78e795.png

image.png.9953d2672580715502c155ef0e8a8bcd.png

It would also be nice if "Albums" could be renamed to "books" or a default view set - ie My collection is organised in Folders which my users find to be the most usable view.

 

Another quirk I don't seem to be able to solve is that even though the filenames have the chapter number in them, they all show up with the same name in Album (I use OpenAudible to split the books in to a file per chapter)

image.thumb.png.b19c3a0431f9c343955d3f991bfba8e1.png 

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