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[Feature Request] AudioBooks Library Type


joehoppe

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joehoppe

Hi guys,

 

i got some audiobooks last weekend and i importet them directly into my library. I split my music and my audiobooks but i can't find a audio-book library type.

 

Now i use the music type but the books called album and the files called songs. I followed the music naming guide in the wiki to group the files.

In my opinion the music type is not ideal for audio-books.

 

My Request is to create a audio-book type looks like the series in movies.

 

If i missed the feature and it is already in emby could we extend the music naming wiki page with an audio-book part?

 

Thanks a lot!

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PenkethBoy

I have audio books as well and have them setup in a separate library (music) - most are found ok and i have added folder.jpg's so the viewing is more attractive

 

But a more fully featured library would be good - issue might be Emby getting the metadata from an online source if MusicBrainz et al do not have them in their catalogue etc

 

Have a related issue with Podcasts audio and video which i have split into two other libraries - have yet to experiment with a "unset" library to combine these to see if i get better mileage

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...
Catsrules

Along with the metadata and basic library  feature we also need a resume feature as loosing your spot in a 20 hour audio file is no fun :(

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You can try out audio book support in the latest beta release of Emby Server. Simply create a library using the Books content type. Once scanned in you can play and resume just like you would expect with audio books. Please try it out and give us your feedback, we're listening. Thanks !

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  • 1 year later...
alekdavis

So, which media types should we use for this: music or books (I created audiobook libraries under music, because I thought books would be something like digital books, and they work fine, just the type of music does not really describe them well).

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alekdavis

I redid my audiobook libraries as Books and I do not like it. There is no option to prefer metadata info to file names, so it ended up with some weird structure (e.g. I have a few album folders under a single folder and it just kept the same hierarchy instead of keeping it flat). Also, for some reason, each track is shown as a separate CD wasting space. Switching them back to the Music libraries. (We really need an Audiobook type, IMHO.)

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  • 11 months later...

Hi Dev Team,

 

Thank you for the great product. I just discovered it today and it seems it something I was looking for years.

 

It does support m4b file for audiobooks, however, if i may suggest few improvements which will help other audiobook fans.

1. Attempt to play m4b file (encoded with aac) from chrome forces re-transcoding to aac, which requires some time, as ffmpeg does not support multithreaded aac encoding and typical book size is about 1Gig. Reason for transcoding: Container not supported Audio codec not supported

 

2. It would be great to have chapter navigation within audibooks (especially on mobile devices), i believe chapters are part of mp4 spec and metadata about them could be easily extracted with ffmpeg -f ffmetadata. As implementation suggestionit would be useful to show progress bar within a chapter and show chapter counter separately.

 

3. Once file is synced on device it will be usefull to use m4b container features saving playing position in file, saving bookmarks, etc. This will be very usefull in offline e.g. airplane mode.

 

Nevertheless, it does work and thank you for this.

 

On a separate note plex users were asking for this audiobook support for 5+ years, and it's still very basic, while you could help a lot of people with having this done right.

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2. It would be great to have chapter navigation within audibooks (especially on mobile devices), i believe chapters are part of mp4 spec and metadata about them could be easily extracted with ffmpeg -f ffmetadata. As implementation suggestionit would be useful to show progress bar within a chapter and show chapter counter separately.

 

 

There is already implementation in web and mobile apps for scene splitting for video. The same will work for audiobooks the only thing needed is extracting metadata from the audiobook.

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Hi Dev Team,

 

Thank you for the great product. I just discovered it today and it seems it something I was looking for years.

 

It does support m4b file for audiobooks, however, if i may suggest few improvements which will help other audiobook fans.

1. Attempt to play m4b file (encoded with aac) from chrome forces re-transcoding to aac, which requires some time, as ffmpeg does not support multithreaded aac encoding and typical book size is about 1Gig. Reason for transcoding: Container not supported Audio codec not supported

 

2. It would be great to have chapter navigation within audibooks (especially on mobile devices), i believe chapters are part of mp4 spec and metadata about them could be easily extracted with ffmpeg -f ffmetadata. As implementation suggestionit would be useful to show progress bar within a chapter and show chapter counter separately.

 

3. Once file is synced on device it will be usefull to use m4b container features saving playing position in file, saving bookmarks, etc. This will be very usefull in offline e.g. airplane mode.

 

Nevertheless, it does work and thank you for this.

 

On a separate note plex users were asking for this audiobook support for 5+ years, and it's still very basic, while you could help a lot of people with having this done right.

 

Hi, thanks for the feedback. Our audio book features are still in early stages at this point. If we can look at an example of the transcoding failure that would be great. How to report a media playback issue. thanks !

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Team,

 

Just tried new version 4 release. Thank you very much for moving into direction of Audiobook support, however it seems it was just cloned from Music

 

[Please let me know if it's better report individual issues on github]

 

I would suggest to move into direction of supporting audiobook domain model

There are 2 major formats: mp3 typically as a folder with files and m4b typcally 1 file (in some accations, files a split with suffix "Part x", however this should be ignored from domain model perspective as it's just container).

Thus, combination of mp3 with same Album should represent a Book (Titles are used for chapters), combination of m4b with same Title should represent a Book (Album is used for series).

 

Top level navigation should include:

Suggestions, Series (Album tag), Authors, Narrators (Composer tag), Genres, Books, Playlists, Folders.

No need for Album Artist.

 

Books need to be presented by artwork (or collage of all artworks if mp3 contains different immages or folder with mp3 contains image or m4b contains multiple covers - mp4 format support this). But 1 picture would be fine.

 

After clicking to a Book, no need to start immidiate play, need to enter and see chapter information:

 - in case of mp3 - list of mp3 files with titles used as chapters

 - in case of m4b - list of chapters from meta information (extracted with ffmpeg -i in.m4b -f ffmetadata in.txt)

 

Play screen should display large artwork picture.

 

After clicking to specific shapter or large play button play starts.

Play could to be save on the level of a Book, it might be innacurate for mp3 especially with VBR, so, might need to be saved as -5 sec. That what iBook on iOS does - very convinient.

 

The same content idealy to be displayed on mobile clients, i doubt people listen audibooks on TV :)

Edited by yermak
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Hi, thanks for the input. Great suggestions. Yes I agree using the music layout is not a perfect fit. It's just a starting point for now.

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  • 2 years later...
  • 1 month later...
6 hours ago, Ifrit said:

Hi,
I see that this topic has been little stale, is there any update to this and Audiobooks support in general?
Thank you

Hi, there already is an audio books library type.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/18/2021 at 11:59 PM, Luke said:

Audio book level resume is coming in Emby Server 4.7:

Untitled.png

Thanks for this update, hope it is released soon. One thing to add, I tried it out in the beta, and it seems to only catch progress after a certain time has been played. It seems that it is a percentage, which makes the necessary progress could be significant before it get saved. From my point, it should always be saved after the first 15 minutes or so, regardless from the length of the Audiobook. Would that be possible?

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I'm really excited for Audio book level resume. Beyond just looking cleaner when on the actual AudioBook I hope it adjusts these parts of Emby:

  • Everywhere there is a section like "recently played", "frequently played", "Continue Listening", "Downloads" etc. I want the entire book and only the book to be listed, not the individual chapter (I don't care that I recently played 6 chapters. I care that I recently played the book). Then I hope I can resume on the book level instead of the chapter level.
  • I'm hoping this adjusts downloaded AudioBooks in addition to AudioBooks being streamed.
  • When using Emby Home with Google Assistant I hope that I'm only presented with book titles instead of chapters to choose from, though this may be caused by my chapters being called "[title] - [chapter]". Even still, I hope that a chapter will be treated as a chapter and isn't presented as an option to choose: I only want to be presented with book titles.

This has been one of my biggest hangups for using Emby as an AudioBook server. I'm so excited to have this available.

 

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