Audio books? is Audioserve still the bee's knees?

EdibleFriend@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 46 points –

Looking into self hosting for this and this seems to be the top answer on the googles but, then again, the googles are shit now so i figured id ask you folk.

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I prefer audiobookshelf. As it has download for offline play. The only downsides I've found is that you can't have it on a sub-folder, and the metadata on my audiobooks are completely trash. So they sometimes don't map correctly. But that's my own problem. Once I fixed it/enriched it it's been great so far.

And if your into stats it also has weekly graphs and a yearly review thingy:

audiobook shelf year in review graph

I'm not crazy into stats (I don't track books when I re-read them, though goodreads supports that), but audible's "you read 30k minutes last year" was definitely kind of cool. (The fact that it took me a full 30 minutes to add the new books I've read across 5 apps since last time I bothered putting stuff on goodreads? Not so much.)

My problem is I have a whole stack of different apps to fill out my listening, so Audible's numbers are 90% the 1 author I actually bought from them outright, then there's two different library apps, and a subscription to Scribd Everand for a bunch of my reading, plus actual files in a different app, so none of it really means anything, and not everyone provides it so I can't even compare.

It's too bad the iOS app is stuck behind test flight, but it looks like it supports ebooks, too, so I think I might try it on my Android readers and see how it manages for those. I desperately need a better system for those than "just go find the file and use boox drop when I feel like it".

Yeah, the main dev classes their app(s) as beta /not complete, so that's why it's behind test flight. They explained their reasoning behind it on the issue tracker, whether we agree or not it's their show.

For eBooks let me know how you go. I have not used that feature set yet.

Eh, it is what it is. I could sideload if I really wanted to.

After more effort than it should have taken (for some reason my PIA app or Android was bouncing local connections even with the settings to allow it enabled) ebooks do work. Probably not well enough for me to actually use it, though. It only turns pages with swipes and doesn't really give any ways to do formatting. I'm surprised I've seen it suggested by people for ebooks with how limited it is. (I fully understand that it's not the priority development-wise).

But at least I finally set up docker, which I've meant to do forever.

In couple of months I will be building my first server and I was looking for something for audiobooks too. What do you mean that subfokders are not supported? Now I manualy add books to my phone and my folder structure is: Books series > * Book 1 * Book 2

Or Standalone books > * Book X * Book Y

That wont work?

I don't really care about stats, I have Storygraph for that. But what is the difrence between books finished and books listened to? Shoudnt the latter be bigger number than the former?

You finished 46 books in 14 sessions?

Sub folder for the web/API. I should have been more descriptive. IE: I had to have it on http://abshelf.example.com instead of http://example.com/abshelf/

ABS has a known directory structure for "figuring out" titles, authors, etc https://www.audiobookshelf.org/docs/#book-directory-structure . The problem I had is with the "Series" as I have them all saved in 1 folder. Books>Author-Title(Series, #)/files. Because of my terrible convention and I am probably the only one who does it, it only sometimes matched.
But after remapping everything (I immediately setup backups so I never have to do it again).

For the stats, I only recently installed it, in November. So I marked a few books as finished, but didn't "listen" to them. Thus the stats are all skewed

I hate that there is such a rigid structure required for directories and such. Can't my drive of audiobooks just be scattered trash like everything else in my data life? Lol

Hahaha. You only have to spend a few hours like me remapping everything and then you'll never have to worry about the file structure!