audiobooks in emby?

[nmbrg 3]

So, i just found out that plex wont fully support audiobooks. Does emby support audiobooks? I mean so they actually have their own category, and not using "music" as they do in plex.

 

And, the last question, if you want to add swedish audiobooks, would they match?
Plex has a usermade agent that collects metadata from audible. and that site has no swedish books, so its useless for me that only listens to swedish books.

[Gilgamesh_48 943]

The answer is yes, and no.

 

I cannot get audiobook resume/ff/rw to work at all in Emby at all. That is the only part of audiobook support I need and it does, mostly, work in Plex.

 

My audiobooks are the only part of my media library I still use Plex for. For me and my limited needs Plex works for audiobooks and Emby does not.

 

I still run a Plex server on my Shield TV for that one reason.

[nmbrg 3]

The answer is yes, and no.

 

I cannot get audiobook resume/ff/rw to work at all in Emby at all. That is the only part of audiobook support I need and it does, mostly, work in Plex.

 

My audiobooks are the only part of my media library I still use Plex for. For me and my limited needs Plex works for audiobooks and Emby does not.

 

I still run a Plex server on my Shield TV for that one reason.

 

Oh, ok. guess ill give plex another try then.

Really need to find a way to match swedish audiobooks though, so the first player that can handle that will get my love.

[Riggs 300]

So, i just found out that plex wont fully support audiobooks. Does emby support audiobooks? I mean so they actually have their own category, and not using "music" as they do in plex.

 

And, the last question, if you want to add swedish audiobooks, would they match?

Plex has a usermade agent that collects metadata from audible. and that site has no swedish books, so its useless for me that only listens to swedish books.

 

Yes it does.

 

Go to Libraries in your server, add a new one in the  + when the dialog show up, in "Content Type" choose: "Audio Books"

 

The metadata for Audiobooks still in development because is hard to get the info, but you can add your own covers. Emby is ready with the content type and working on fix any issue that you can found.

 

Here a discussion about it ------> https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/64803-audio-book-feature-request-or-tweak-suggestion/page-5&do=findComment&comment=672733

 

Here the wiki to set up your library ------> https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Audio-Book-Naming

 

 

 

[BlazedMonkey 94]

Plex shows it all perfectly as you would expect it to:

 

 

Emby takes everything and jams it all into 1 folder/album:

 

[Jdiesel 1114]

I found Emby and Booksonic to be a good combination. Booksonic isn't perfect but it supports resume, resuming of multiple track books, and has playback speed controls which are all things I need to playback audiobooks.

[Gilgamesh_48 943]

Since my original post in this thread I have made some changes. I now use Emby for all things video both moving and static and MediaMonkey for all things audio without a video component.

 

I run audio from a computer dedicated to MediaMonkey throughout my house and that allows me to listen to audiobooks wherever I am in the house and I can control playback with my Echo devices by simple commands using the Echo skill called Viki. Also I have several wireless keyboards around the house connected to that computer that allows manual start/stop by pressing the space bar on any of them.

 

By doing it that way and separating the audio and video functions I seem to have fewer problems and can listen to audiobooks or music wherever I am.

 

I think I have found, for me, the best of all possible setups. I really think that I no longer care if Emby ever correctly supports Audiobooks with full resume/ff/rw functionality. Every time I think of using Emby for audiobooks I realize that there are simply too many limitations for it to be viable for me.

[Hawkwinter 11]

On 4/24/2019 at 6:13 AM, Gilgamesh_48 said:

I cannot get audiobook resume/ff/rw to work at all in Emby at all. That is the only part of audiobook support I need and it does, mostly, work in Plex.

Your post has convinced me I want to set up Mediamonkey and test it - but I did manage to get resume/ff/rw to work with an audiobook in Emby.

>Convert audiobook to mp3
>Change extension to mp4
>Number it as episodes in a show if it's broken into chapters, or slap it in as a movie, or whatever else you want to do.
>Set your metadata by copypasting it from a website with the right audiobook data.
>Set the poster image the same way.
>Make a thumbnail by taking your 1:1 audiobook cover, opening it in your image editor of choice, saving it as a 16:9 png with a transparent background around the square, and set that as the thumbnail (or be satisfied with it showing the fan art of the 'show' instead).

It does work for playback / ff / resume / rw. Though it's a pretty manual setup. And if your audiobook is all one file instead of in chapters, moving via the scrubber is not great.

Edit: This workaround works on web and on my phone. It does not work on my TV*
[It does if you load the main Emby app onto the TV, it does not with the Emby for Android TV app I had installed at the time.]

I was hoping to put it in a "TV Show" with related shows and movies, like I have been increasingly doing with my movies and the like as well. Going to test out the separate audiobook library functionality now as of current day - I looked at Mediamonkey, and it wants me to buy it before I can find out if it will work on my phone - and it seems it does not have a client for my NVidia Shield? - both of which are frustrating. I'll figure out an approach that works for me. If that includes a satisfactory way to do it in Emby - I will update here - So far Emby Audiobooks seems (currently) pretty rough for my purposes. It plays, but I can't figure out how to arrange them by series or anything like I woudl do under a "TV Series". I may ultimately convert all of my audiobooks to MP4 with an unchanging black square as the 'video'. Inconvenient - but I haven't figured out a better approach yet.

Edited July 12, 2022 by Hawkwinter

[Luke 37064]

On 7/8/2022 at 11:55 PM, Hawkwinter said:

Your post has convinced me I want to set up Mediamonkey and test it - but I did manage to get resume/ff/rw to work with an audiobook in Emby.

>Convert audiobook to mp3
>Change extension to mp4
>Number it as episodes in a show if it's broken into chapters, or slap it in as a movie, or whatever else you want to do.
>Set your metadata by copypasting it from a website with the right audiobook data.
>Set the poster image the same way.
>Make a thumbnail by taking your 1:1 audiobook cover, opening it in your image editor of choice, saving it as a 16:9 png with a transparent background around the square, and set that as the thumbnail (or be satisfied with it showing the fan art of the 'show' instead).

It does work for playback / ff / resume / rw. Though it's a pretty manual setup. And if your audiobook is all one file instead of in chapters, moving via the scrubber is not great.

Edit: This workaround works on web and on my phone. It does not work on my TV

I was hoping to put it in a "TV Show" with related shows and movies, like I have been increasingly doing with my movies and the like as well. Going to test out the separate audiobook library functionality now as of current day - I looked at Mediamonkey, and it wants me to buy it before I can find out if it will work on my phone - and it seems it does not have a client for my NVidia Shield? - both of which are frustrating. I'll figure out an approach that works for me. If that includes a satisfactory way to do it in Emby - I will update here - So far Emby Audiobooks seems (currently) pretty rough for my purposes. It plays, but I can't figure out how to arrange them by series or anything like I woudl do under a "TV Series". I may ultimately convert all of my audiobooks to MP4 with an unchanging black square as the 'video'. Inconvenient - but I haven't figured out a better approach yet.

Hi @Hawkwinter why exactly do you think that you had to go through all of that?

[Hawkwinter 11]

On 7/10/2022 at 11:06 PM, Luke said:

Hi @Hawkwinter why exactly do you think that you had to go through all of that?

Short Explanation:
The default way Emby assumes I want to organize my stuff is not at all how I want to organize my stuff, and the 'next up' / 'continue watching' only seems to work how I would want for TV Shows (and even then, I'll want to combine shows in the same franchise together to make it work right, and I think I need to re-jigger things to put 'special episodes' in the right place).
@cayars @Happy2Play
Long Explanation:
Primarily: If I open a franchise up, and hit play, I want it to play each item in the franchise, chronologically. And when we finish one thing in the queue, I want the "Next up" to be the next thing in the list, chronologically. Regardless of if the next thing is a TV Episode, a movie, an audiobook, or an audio-comic, and I want a nice presentable per-franchise organization scheme.

If I watch Star Wars, Episode 1, and the next thing in my collection is the Clone Wars movie (I think that's whats next chronologically - I haven't sorted my Star Wars stuff yet) - I want the Clone Wars movie to be what comes up in my up-next. Followed by The Clone Wars Season 2 episode 16, Cat and Mouse.

When I want to work through the MCU with my son when he's a bit older I want to start with Iron Man, and then work my way through the various movies and TV Series, again in a roughly Chronological order, with the seasons and films occurring chronologically (I won't jump between shows in a season unless they relate back to eachother, but there are some instances where that happens - and I'll want to work that in back and forth).

Buffy / Angel interweave frequently. I don't know exactly how I'll handle that. Probably combine them into a 'Buffyverse' super-show that includes both, with big seasons for their overlap. Similar with Stargates SG-1 and Atlantis. But sometimes I want to watch one or the other individually - particularly if I'm just looking to shuffle reruns rather than do 'A Proper Watch-Through'. So I might make it as a Hard-Link-Clone so I have them both separate and together and I can watch them either way.

So a separate "Audiobook Library" wasn't going to be my first choice, because it would never let me put things where they go. For instance, the Star Wars Audiobook "Dark Disciple" takes place during The Clone Wars season 5, between episode 16 and 17. That's where I intend to put it.

I tried making a mixed-media library, but I found it unsatisfactory even though ultimately what I want is for all of my media (except music if I start using Emby for Music) to be in a sort of mixed-media library. [I don't recall the reason. It may have been an 'next up' / 'continue watching' issue, or may have been something else - it was months ago].

I did briefly consider instead some approach of trying to hide all my libraries and tagging everything and using the smart-playlist generator extension to handle everything, but it's not ideal for pausing and resuming and picking up where you left off, and I do want genre separation, not one giant library of playlists.

I also experimented with Collections. And ended up with questions of "How do I arrange my collections so they're separated by genres, and then within a collection I might have a season (or half a season) of a show, followed by a movie, and then the rest of the season." And fought with that a bit. I figured out I could maybe do it if I combined TV Show Genre Libraries with collections, and did a bunch of metadata restructuring and whatnot. But then, for at least some stuff, it might be simpler to make it a single TV Series and skip the collections.

And then I tried porting some films to be a custom TV series (IIRC I started with the four Ron Perlman Hellboy films because there were only a couple of them), and found the result to be the most satisfactory approach of the bunch. And then started thinking about moving most things with any degree of tied-in episodic series-ness so that they'd be in a show together.

Ultimately I ended up with 9 "TV Show" libraries I like, sorted by genres I'm interested in rather than "media type", and a Movies library I would probably like to do away with - or at least seriously trim down and reduce to only solo movies that aren't part of a larger series. [Edit: I also don't want to triple the number of libraries I have to 27 so I have the same 9 libraries for Audiobooks and the same 9 for Movies, and then be switching back and forth between them.]



Side-reasons:
The metadata I want on an audiobook is similar to what I would want for a TV Series. Listing the Narrator and Author; Organizational stuff; book number; series number in a franchise perhaps; Book review ratings from amazon - I dont remember what the exact fields were in the audio file version, but I recall not seeing everything I would expect. I came across this thread while looking into adding my audiobooks to Emby, and saw that you couldn't speed up / slow down / ff / rw / resume. I have since inferred that's no longer accurate. But it did make me curious to try out putting it in as a TV series, and (for the organizational reasons I listed above) - I'm glad that worked.

[Hawkwinter 11]

It's not a criticism of Emby. I get that you set it up based on how the databases have things segregated. TMDB and TVDB do not inter-connect; TVDB has a bunch of bureaucracy about how it needs to be arranged and has no real competition for western TV; I don't think you pull from AniDB or MDL or MAL; For bigger franchises the timeline orders are basically only in their respective wikis, etc and you can't easily scrape them. - I get that.

But that doesn't stop me wanting my mixed media collection arranged in a particular watch order and wanting continue-watching / up-next to work correctly with it.

Edited July 12, 2022 by Hawkwinter