Organization of Audio Dramas

[Mimcentric 1]

I have a very large collection of audio dramas I'm trying to find the best way to sort. My issue is that many of them are anthologies, so they don't have set chapters like audio books and often have different stories. I was wondering if there was a way to get Emby to recognize them under the TV format, so I can have an episode synopsis listed beside their thumbnail for easy browsing.

I tried an audiobook library for this, but the episode blurbs are hidden unless I click on them to play. It's just not as nicely displayed for quick browsing. It's workable viewing the library from the folder screen, but not quite what I want. I also attempted a mixed library, but half of the dramas are trying to display as TV series (with no episodes recognized) or are trying to display like audio books folders.

Thanks!

[Abobader 3471]

Hello Mimcentric,

Please wait for someone from staff support or our members to reply to you.

It's recommended to provide more info, as it explain in this thread:

Thank you.

Emby Team

[Carlo 4561]

2 hours ago, Mimcentric said:

I have a very large collection of audio dramas I'm trying to find the best way to sort. My issue is that many of them are anthologies, so they don't have set chapters like audio books and often have different stories. I was wondering if there was a way to get Emby to recognize them under the TV format, so I can have an episode synopsis listed beside their thumbnail for easy browsing.

I tried an audiobook library for this, but the episode blurbs are hidden unless I click on them to play. It's just not as nicely displayed for quick browsing. It's workable viewing the library from the folder screen, but not quite what I want. I also attempted a mixed library, but half of the dramas are trying to display as TV series (with no episodes recognized) or are trying to display like audio books folders.

Thanks!

What exactly is an audio drama?  Can you give us more info on the format & duration of them?

[Mimcentric 1]

1 hour ago, cayars said:

What exactly is an audio drama?  Can you give us more info on the format & duration of them?

It's like those old time radio plays from the 40s and 50s, with multiple voice actors, music scores, and sound effects. My dramas can range from 20-40 minute episodes like a TV show would be, but some of them are over an hour, in mp3 format. With every episode being a completely different story, just made by the same production team, it's hard to choose what to listen to sometimes by title alone. One production company has over 1000 stories over the course of their entire run in my collection. Several of them have different seasons like a TV show would. Modern ones are delivered via podcasts now. I know there is a podcast plugin with premiere, does that offer a better format and library layout? I haven't been able to find any screenshots or video of what it looks like compared to the other audio libraries. 

EDIT: another example, i have the Twilight Zone audio drama, which is exactly like watching the show with your eyes closed, so i would try to organize it in the same way I would the tv show itself.

Edited January 8, 2021 by Mimcentric

[Carlo 4561]

OK understand what they are now and was kind of what I thought but wanted to check and not assume.

It would seem audiobook library type would be the one to use but you said you have an issue with it.

Can you show a screenshot maybe marked up to show what doesn't work well for you?

[Mimcentric 1]

On 1/8/2021 at 7:08 PM, cayars said:

OK understand what they are now and was kind of what I thought but wanted to check and not assume.

It would seem audiobook library type would be the one to use but you said you have an issue with it.

Can you show a screenshot maybe marked up to show what doesn't work well for you?

Sorry for the late reply. I have very spotty internet service.

Basically, I want to display and sort them like a TV show.

With the audiobook library, my files look like this for audio dramas with seasons:

When I would like them to look like this:

In the audiobook format, it treats each episode like a book chapter. Since the audio dramas are essentially just radio television shows, I'd like to sort them that way.

Another example are anthology series. For Tales From Beyond the Pale, I have to separate each individual episode into different files in order to display their unique cover art for each story. This is pretty common for anthologies as well as seasonal series.

When having them display like a TV series makes it much easier to browse story description per episode while still displaying the unique artwork. Since a lot of anthologies also have seasons, it makes sorting them much easier. Larger series (such as CBS Radio Myster Theater, with over 1,400 episodes) would really benefit from the TV library format for easy choice of which episode to play, since the audiobook format doesn't display episode descriptions.

The visual display of how many episodes are remaining per series is also nice, which is another thing the audiobook library doesn't support.

I was able to trick emby into using the TV library for my audio dramas by changing the extension to .mp4 with the tradeoff of being unable to resume in the middle of an episode.

Is there another way to get the TV library to accept mp3 files? Does the Podcast library sort this way? If there are no other libraries that can sort mp3 files in this manner, I'd love to leave that as a suggestion or allow the TV library type to accept mp3s.

Edited January 19, 2021 by Mimcentric
adding more info

[Luke 42087]

There isn't a way to make them look like TV series, although we'll be expanding on audio book features in future updates. thanks.

[Mimcentric 1]

3 minutes ago, Luke said:

There isn't a way to make them look like TV series, although we'll be expanding on audio book features in future updates. thanks.

Thank you I appreciate it and look forward to seeing the future updates!