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Audiobook support


horstepipe

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hobesman

Hi Runtimesandbox. Welcome to the audiobook discussion!

A few things to reply to your comments:

  • You can change the default tab a library opens to by (oddly) accessing the setting under "Home Screen" settings. Down at the bottom, you can choose what each library opens to by default.
  • You're right. The suggestions screen is currently not very useful for audiobooks. It suggest tracks (i.e. chapters) instead of suggesting albums (i.e. books). If these were music, that would make sense, as most of the time certain songs are easier to recommend than entire albums. With audiobooks, suggesting tracks makes no sense. I currently don't use the "Suggestions" tab at all for audiobooks.
  • As for the numbers in your filenames not appearing, that's because Emby is configured to use the metadata that's been embedded in each file. Specifically, it's looking at the album, artist, album artist, title, track, and (maybe) cover art tags. To change what shows up in Emby you'll need to use a program (I use free MP3Tag) to edit the details in the tags. If nothing else, in Windows you can edit some of the basic information tags by right clicking a file, selecting "Properties" and then switching to the Details tab. Whatever is in the "Title" field is what Emby will show as the chapter or track name. I'm not sure if/what you'd need to do to get Emby to recognize changes to existing files, but at the very least it will show up correctly for new files added with the correct tag information.

Hope that helps.

Edited by hobesman
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runtimesandbox

Thanks for the info @hobesman!

Good to know that I can change it from going directly to Suggestions, shame its under Home Screen as that means it's not a global change and will only affect my user account. 

Have just spent the afternoon sorting out the id tags for the latest audio books, weirdly emby seems that it used to read the file name if the id tag was blank (would have been an easy fix) as old books without a title id tag used the file name, seems that no longer works in the current stable of emby.

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hobesman

Hmm. Well as a workaround, if you already have the filenames as you want, you can use the "Convert" menu in MP3Tag to batch copy the filenames to the title tags. Or any number of other automated options (title = album + track #, or title = "Part" + track #, etc.)

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runtimesandbox
18 hours ago, hobesman said:

Hmm. Well as a workaround, if you already have the filenames as you want, you can use the "Convert" menu in MP3Tag to batch copy the filenames to the title tags. Or any number of other automated options (title = album + track #, or title = "Part" + track #, etc.)

Did not know this, really useful thank you!

 

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horstepipe

playing around with audio books again, I'm wondering:
I added an audio book and added artist info to the file. But when I go to artist section and press on the one (I added to the artist field of the audio book) I'm seeing a blank page, why?

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Jbbrack03
1 minute ago, mxmh said:

a chance to be better handle with audiobooks in the future

https://www.reddit.com/r/AbooApp/

It looks like that dev is completely focused on Plex. There are already several Audiobook Apps dedicated to Plex (Chronicle/Prologue). The issue here is that we need something for Emby. Right now Emby's implementation is focused on music, so progress is not really saved across tracks, and it doesn't save which tracks have been listened to so that you know where you are in a series. If these two things could be fixed, we would have a basic useable implementation for Audiobooks. I know that there are other quality-of-life features that would make Audiobooks even better in Emby, but progress tracking is the biggest thing.

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horstepipe
5 minutes ago, horstepipe said:

playing around with audio books again, I'm wondering:
I added an audio book and added artist info to the file. But when I go to artist section and press on the one (I added to the artist field of the audio book) I'm seeing a blank page, why?

okay refreshing the (audio books) library did the trick

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26 minutes ago, Jbbrack03 said:

and it doesn't save which tracks have been listened to so that you know where you are in a series.

We actually do do that.  Can you please try the beta version of the Android TV app?  I have audiobook resume from an "album" working there in my testing.

Thanks.

image.png

image.png

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horstepipe

question: there's an overview/plot field editable for each track of an album. But how can one make these visible?

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7 hours ago, horstepipe said:

question: there's an overview/plot field editable for each track of an album. But how can one make these visible?

Should already be there in the web app.  I'll update Android TV to show it too.

Edit:  Actually, it should already be there...

image.png

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hobesman

To be clear, horstepipe asked about the description for each track.

On a related note, I wish the description for the album would be taken from the tag data. If there's already a way to do that I would welcome any tips.

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10 minutes ago, hobesman said:

To be clear, horstepipe asked about the description for each track.

Oh... okay, I missed that detail.  That's a little trickier...

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  • 2 weeks later...
nmkaufman

+1

I noticed offline / downloaded podcasts & audiobooks are no longer treated as audiobooks. They're treated like music (no resume function.)

Is this planned for the future? Or not even possible to do?

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Chyron
38 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, yes expanded audio book features are planned for future updates. Thanks for the feedback.

You know, I like the idea of having some sort of roadmap, so we can see the priority tier list of certain features.

I'm sure you yourself probably have one, to help keep track of stuff. But for myself, I'd feel better knowing it's actually on the list rather than being obligated to bug you about this feature once a quarter for the foreseeable future.

Edited by Chyron
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miniliQuid
On 11/16/2020 at 5:49 PM, Chyron said:

You know, I like the idea of having some sort of roadmap, so we can see the priority tier list of certain features.

I'm sure you yourself probably have one, to help keep track of stuff. But for myself, I'd feel better knowing it's actually on the list rather than being obligated to bug you about this feature once a quarter for the foreseeable future.

Honestly it's better to keep bugging him, since that will bump the thread and have it show up again for others. That way they can add their vote, making it bigger and bigger eventually, meaning bigger priority :D

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nmkaufman
2 hours ago, miniliQuid said:

bump the thread and have it show up again for others.

I don't disagree.

This is something I didn't even care about until a few days ago.

I spent several days ironing out a way to automatically download & organize podcasts, intending to replace my Android podcast app with Emby.

Should I have tested it before wasting hours of time? Yes.

Does it provide me some amount of comfort to know others care about this feature, as well? Also yes.

I'm content to keep using Doggcatcher, for now, and have it be a nice surprise when this functionality is improved.

Edited by nmkaufman
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Jbbrack03
23 minutes ago, nmkaufman said:

I don't disagree.

This is something I didn't even care about until a few days ago.

I spent several days ironing out a way to automatically download & organize podcasts, intending to replace my Android podcast app with Emby.

Should I have tested it before wasting hours of time? Yes.

Does it provide me some amount of comfort to know others care about this feature, as well? Also yes.

I'm content to keep using Doggcatcher, for now, and have it be a nice surprise when this functionality is improved.

Right now for Audiobooks, Offline Podcasts, and Audio dramas I'm using Plex along with an Android App called Chronicle. This isn't ideal because I'd like to have everything handled by Emby. But for now it has the resume features and playback features that you really need for listening to this kind of content. And as a bonus the structure is the same as what Emby will end up using, so when this feature is fleshed out on Emby I can just point it at those directories and have it ready to go. So I'm not doing double work in that sense. Ready to completely remove Plex from my lineup.

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MBSki
19 minutes ago, Jbbrack03 said:

Right now for Audiobooks, Offline Podcasts, and Audio dramas I'm using Plex along with an Android App called Chronicle.

It looks like Emby can download Podcasts too, but after downloading, they don't show up in downloads. Is there a workaround, or is this a know feature request?

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Hi, I believe Emby doesn't download the podcasts but just plays them back from the online source located in the RSS feed you setup for them.

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MBSki
6 minutes ago, cayars said:

Hi, I believe Emby doesn't download the podcasts but just plays them back from the online source located in the RSS feed you setup for them.

Ah, gotcha. So it allows a download, but it doesn't actually download. Did I understand that right?

Looks like that's the reason to use Plex to download. 😁

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nmkaufman
1 hour ago, Jbbrack03 said:

and Audio dramas

Speaking of, I have a small collection of old radio shows and dramas, and I cannot decide if they belong with Audiobooks or Podcasts.

I hate to create a 3rd library, since I only have a handful (sherlock holmes, hitchiker's guide, etc.)

34 minutes ago, mbarylski said:

Ah, gotcha. So it allows a download, but it doesn't actually download. Did I understand that right?

I use gpodder to download & organize my subscriptions to a folder, and then simply point Emby at it.

It has a CLI, so you can schedule it with a simple batch script.

No reason to run a 2nd media server just for that.

Edited by nmkaufman
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Jbbrack03

My use-case for Podcasts may be a little different from yours. For normal non-drama podcasts I tend to just stream them through Google Podcasts on my phone. Mainly because in most cases I won't be listening to them more than once. For Audio Dramas I have a category just for those. I also grabbed a bunch of free open-license classic audio drama stuff from Archive.org and I have a category just for classic Audio Dramas. I've been manually downloading my Audio Drama podcast episodes from each respective podcast website. Which is tedious, so I'll definitely look into gpodder.

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