Audiobooks: Merge Album Artists with Artists and call them "Authors"

[Jbbrack03 35]

Currently because the Audiobooks section of Emby is mirrored after Music, there are two headings on the Audiobooks Page for "Album Artists" and "Artists". Please replace these with a heading for "Authors".

[laie_techie 16]

For audiobooks there really should be different fields for who wrote the book (Author) and who is reading it (Album Artist?).

[Jbbrack03 35]

21 minutes ago, laie_techie said:

For audiobooks there really should be different fields for who wrote the book (Author) and who is reading it (Album Artist?).

This is one area that might be a bit hit and miss depending on how people build their library. Because there isn't a scraper right now in Emby for Audiobook content, most people are filling out the metadata by hand. The headings on the main Audiobooks page are only valuable as a way of sorting that content quickly. For them to be useful, people would need to be filling out both the author and narrator fields when they create the metadata. I'm not sure that everyone normally fills in both. So this might be subjectively very useful for those that are completionists when it comes to metadata and inconsequential for those that don't. It's an interesting topic regardless.

[negativzeroe 80]

17 hours ago, laie_techie said:

For audiobooks there really should be different fields for who wrote the book (Author) and who is reading it (Album Artist?).

For me it's reversed, album artist is author and artist is narrator...

[ebr 16171]

5 minutes ago, negativzeroe said:

For me it's reversed, album artist is author and artist is narrator...

That would seem more "correct" to me but is that a standard convention?  Or is there actually a "Narrator" tag?

[Jbbrack03 35]

This would have to be fixed by adding a Narrator tag. And ultimately Emby devs would need to choose which tags mean which function. Whatever you guys pick, we will use. 

Edited March 12, 2021 by Jbbrack03

[negativzeroe 80]

14 minutes ago, ebr said:

That would seem more "correct" to me but is that a standard convention?  Or is there actually a "Narrator" tag?

I use just a regular MP3 tagger so I have the same fields that music has. Just have to kind of work with it because there is no open standard for Audiobooks.

[Luke 42077]

What does Audible do?

[negativzeroe 80]

5 minutes ago, Luke said:

What does Audible do?

They have a proprietary format and I think metadata is just in the app, like when you export to MP3 from AAX it maps to known MP3 tags.

[Luke 42077]

2 minutes ago, negativzeroe said:

They have a proprietary format and I think metadata is just in the app, like when you export to MP3 from AAX it maps to known MP3 tags.

That's OK, it's mainly about how they present their UI. I'll be installing it when i have a chance as well as other popular audio book apps.

[Jbbrack03 35]

Audible has a search function that let's you search for whatever terms you want. If you search for an author, then it returns all author results. If you search for a narrator, then it returns all narrator results. Same for book titles or series titles. So it's basically just a smart search rather than a bunch of category buttons. Which is fine by me, but I'd imagine would be a lot more work for the Emby devs.

[ginjaninja 605]

musicbrainz has had a stab at at a standard for audiobooks

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases/Audiobook

but its a bit of a moot point as there is no plugin to interpret the data into a set of standardised tags, albeit some guidance on how the standard tags (title, artist etc) which picard does write out are declared.

this is how picard writes out an audiobook as standard

in the mean time maybe its a case of emby just declaring what audiobook tags it will prefer when present, for people who want to conform and get ideal presentation in emby

a starter for 10 for 'advanced' audiobook tags which if present are preferred

author 

narrator

album  = "the name of the book"

 

alternatively Emby might be said to conform to mbz and provide an improved standard if it just treated the 1st artistS/albumartistS as the author and the subsequent as narrator(s).

 

 

[dapper 13]

5 hours ago, ginjaninja said:

musicbrainz has had a stab at at a standard for audiobooks

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases/Audiobook

but its a bit of a moot point as there is no plugin to interpret the data into a set of standardised tags, albeit some guidance on how the standard tags (title, artist etc) which picard does write out are declared.

this is how picard writes out an audiobook as standard

in the mean time maybe its a case of emby just declaring what audiobook tags it will prefer when present, for people who want to conform and get ideal presentation in emby

a starter for 10 for 'advanced' audiobook tags which if present are preferred

author 

narrator

album  = "the name of the book"

 

alternatively Emby might be said to conform to mbz and provide an improved standard if it just treated the 1st artistS/albumartistS as the author and the subsequent as narrator(s).

 

 

I use Picard to manage a lot of my audiobook tagging ... but I kinda hate a lot of their standards

For compatibility, standardization, and sanity I keep at least these basic tags on everything:

• album = [Name of Book]
• artist = Author1/Author2/Author3
• title = [Whatever]
• tracknumber = x
• genre = Genre1/Genre2/Genre3

And sometimes these, depending on the format:

• discnumber; totaldiscs; totaltracks; date

I hate having the narrator listed in any of the standard "music" tags ... putting it in a dedicated "narrator" tag would be fine (but tbh I don't usually care who the narrator is -- often that info is included in the album art and that's usually plenty for me)

[Luke 42077]

Quote

alternatively Emby might be said to conform to mbz and provide an improved standard if it just treated the 1st artistS/albumartistS as the author and the subsequent as narrator(s).

I think we will generally get into trouble with this type of assumption, so dedicated tag is best.

But of course the next question is, do people actually care who the narrator is? 

[Luke 42077]

On 3/11/2021 at 4:18 PM, Jbbrack03 said:

Currently because the Audiobooks section of Emby is mirrored after Music, there are two headings on the Audiobooks Page for "Album Artists" and "Artists". Please replace these with a heading for "Authors".

Regarding the original suggestion, yes I will proceed with this. Thanks.

[negativzeroe 80]

4 hours ago, Luke said:

Regarding the original suggestion, yes I will proceed with this. Thanks.

You going to throw in an if statement and semi colon if different or something?

[Jbbrack03 35]

6 hours ago, Luke said:

I think we will generally get into trouble with this type of assumption, so dedicated tag is best.

But of course the next question is, do people actually care who the narrator is? 

I don't think that tracking narrators is super common yet. However, I'm sure that some people do. Audio acting is also on the rise and there may come a point where audio actors become celebrities within their category. I don't mind having it listed and tracked. But I also do not currently track content this way myself. 

[ebr 16171]

While I don't know how many people "track" this, the narrator of an audio book can have a huge impact on its enjoyment so I think we should plan for it.

[Dibbes 514]

On 3/15/2021 at 8:03 PM, Luke said:

But of course the next question is, do people actually care who the narrator is? 

most definitely... by the way, for some an example, get Booksonic-Air running... they're doing a pretty good job though a lot is manually entered still...

On 3/16/2021 at 1:00 PM, ebr said:

While I don't know how many people "track" this, the narrator of an audio book can have a huge impact on its enjoyment so I think we should plan for it.

Thumbs up on this statement! 

[tmb4016 93]

Hi @Luke - If you are looking at Audiobook handling ... as well as looking at how the information is presented in different readers and also how Picard for example handles data it might be useful to look at this doc which is the start of a standard on way audio books are published. It is published by the W3C publishing group and although it is only in draft it may give some insight on the future direction of audiobook standards.

World Wide Web Consortium Draft Standard

 

Edited April 18, 2021 by tmb4016

[Luke 42077]

On 4/18/2021 at 12:23 PM, tmb4016 said:

Hi @Luke - If you are looking at Audiobook handling ... as well as looking at how the information is presented in different readers and also how Picard for example handles data it might be useful to look at this doc which is the start of a standard on way audio books are published. It is published by the W3C publishing group and although it is only in draft it may give some insight on the future direction of audiobook standards.

World Wide Web Consortium Draft Standard

 

That's helpful. Thanks for the info.

[ghst9999 0]

Emby should just read the ID3 tap and call it good.  It would save a crap ton of issues.  I had to DELETE my whole audiobook folder just for it to change the names to match what was in the id3 tag.  I even move the file out and rescanned and then moved it back in and rescanned and it put up the wrong image and still the wrong name. it would fix it IF I changed the name of the base file.  Emby should not care about the base file so long as it has a ID3 tag to read and it not use the base file name

[Luke 42077]

1 minute ago, ghst9999 said:

Emby should just read the ID3 tap and call it good.  It would save a crap ton of issues.  I had to DELETE my whole audiobook folder just for it to change the names to match what was in the id3 tag.  I even move the file out and rescanned and then moved it back in and rescanned and it put up the wrong image and still the wrong name. it would fix it IF I changed the name of the base file.  Emby should not care about the base file so long as it has a ID3 tag to read and it not use the base file name

Hi, that's exactly what we do. We don't do anything with audio file names.

[ghst9999 0]

i changed.... a lot and the metadata never updated.  I even tried to update it manually and it still did not take

 

Edited May 25, 2021 by ghst9999
more info

[Luke 42077]

25 minutes ago, ghst9999 said:

i changed.... a lot and the metadata never updated.  I even tried to update it manually and it still did not take

 

Hi, you changed what, and what metadata didn't update? What were you expecting to see? Can you please be more specific? Thanks.