4.6.0.50 has broken Audio Dramas - again

[steamhead 10]

I've long since accepted that I'll never see a library type for Audio Dramas in Emby, I imagine not enough interest, but I do wish you wouldn't keep changing the product to make my efforts to use Emby for Audio Drama a wasted effort.

The basic premise is that though Audio Dramas from a media perspective are most like music albums or audio books, for consumption they are more like TV shows, in that they need to be organised into shows, seasons and importantly present in release order so you can listen to them in the correct order.  After consultation on here and much advice from Luke I settled on using the Audio Books format, in folder view and using sort by release date.  It wasn't perfect, but close, with the folder structure allowing most of the organisation, and then once you reached a folder containing album folders they would be sorted in release order, and once you clicked on the folder it would be presented like an album using the disk and track numbers for sequencing, and allowing me to use the Emby API to push story outlines which appear when you view the album.  After taking advice on here I spent many months reorganising the thousand of titles in my library, both structure and tags, and writing scripts to automate including new content into the library.  In the end I was reasonably happy with the result, bar a few bugbears.

Since upgrading to 4.6.0.50 though this has broken.  Now when you reach a folder full of album folders, they are no longer sorted by release dates, just folder name ignoring the release date entirely, and when you select the folder the contents are simply shown as a list of files, ignoring the disk grouping and track sequencing, both or which were very useful for managing the way the content is consumed.

What settings do I have to make to get back to Emby honouring the By Release Date sequencing for the albums in a folder, and present the album in Album view when I select the album folder, not just a straight file list?

I've seen the setting about folder structure in the Library settings and tried each of the 3 but they don't seem to make a difference.

 

[steamhead 10]

Does anybody know how to get back to the behaviour where a folder full of "audio book albums" can present in Release date order, as they did in the previous release, and how said albums will then automatically present in album view when selected just as they did previously.

[Luke 42078]

hi @steamhead, apologies for the disruption. Have you updated to Emby Server 4.6.2 and run a library scan?

What content type is the library in emby library setup?

[steamhead 10]

Yes I've now updated to 4.6.2 rescanned the libraries and it is still not sorting a folder full of "Albums" into release date as per original behavour for Audio Books and also when I select an album it no longer takes you into the album view as per orginal audiobooks behaviour.

I've also for good measure created a brand new library with a subset of folders in, again in Audiobooks format and using the "Perfectly organised into album folders, with tracks directly in the album folders" setting for Music Folder Structure.  So I would have expected it to recognise album folders and treat them as such - but sadly no more :-(

As a reminder, I'm using Emby here for Audio Dramas which really need to be organised more like TV shows, so you can listen to episodes and seasons of shows in the right order.  So the music library format of Audio books doesn't really work.  But I believe it was you who suggested using Folder View as the initial view, which worked really well with basic folder browsing allowing shows to collected together as shows to be browsed and then sort by release date getting the "albums" in production order to listen to each "Season", and finally the Album View allowing the tracks to be sorted and separated such that episodes, special features and music suites could all be presented separately by judicious use of the Disc and Track tags.

Since 4.6.0.50 though all that disappeared overnight, with "Seasons" now being presented in Alphabetical order rather than release order, and the album itself is now just a list of tracks, losing the nice presentation of the Descriptiion of that "Season" and the separation of the different media.

FYI a season in audio drama terms is essetially a box set of CDs with often an overarching story arc, and a name which bears no resemblence to sequence.  There is no official numbering to apply, the key thing being that if you listen to them in release date order, you listen in the intended order and get all the back references that might be in there.

[Luke 42078]

@steamhead, for the albums underneath a series, why not prefix the album folder names with a number so that they sort correctly in folder view?

[steamhead 10]

Hi Luke,

My audio drama library is 7808 files across 1106 folders so it would not be an insignificant task to prefix each folder with the release date, or any other number.  And this wouldn't be the first time I've had to reshape my audio drama library structure because a feature has gone away in Emby, so I'm sure you can understand why I wouldn't be so keen on that.  Also to ensure things were presented in the correct order and new additions could insert in the correct place, I would have to prefix the folder with release date in yymmdd format, which then takes away a chunk of the title in the display.

I would much rather the bug in Emby be fixed, that was fine until the more recent releases, so that sort by release date, actually sorts by release date, and when I select an album it goes into album view.  It worked a few releases ago, so you've proven it can be done.  I can't see why you took the feature away, if anyone didn't want sort by release date they simply wouldn't have selected it.

I really do like the product and appreciate the work you do and the help you provide, but it does puzzle me when you take away perfectly working features for no apparent gain

Cheers

Dean

[Luke 42078]

@steamhead the difference is that folder view has become a true folder view in order to make it a more accurate representation of your raw flies, and album view is album view. They are not the same thing. 

We are continuing to work on improving folder view though to make it more robust.

[steamhead 10]

You personally advised me to switch my audio dramas to folder view years ago (this is having previously removed vital features from other library types) so that I can present my audio dramas into shows and series (more like TV) but still have the rich view of Album View when you finally reach an album, so that the description can be seen, and it obeys track and disc numbering to clearly arrange the content.

Having removed this feature that has been working perfectly for years, what method do you now suggest for being able to present audio dramas in Show/Series organisation,  but still obey the album structure?  I've looked but not been able to find one, I'd hoped there was something there as I noticed the library section for Audiodramas had a question about telling the scanners whether the folders contained albums, so the library knows about the album content.

How about a product option that allows Album View to be presented when an album folder is selected within folder view?  I can't imagine that would be too difficult as the code to present a folder in album view is already there.