Month: December 2022

Managing Audio Books with Plex

Library Setup

I have a membership with Audible and I sometimes also get other audio book sources. Recently I experimented with combining all of my audio books into a centralized place. Since I already have a Plex server running, I thought it would be a good place to do this.

I did a little research and came across a couple of very helpful articles:

  • A Reddit article;
  • and some really detail information on GitHub;

The main points are:

  • I have a single folder to store all of my audio books. Inside the folder, each audio book is stored as an “m4b” file.
  • Ensure that audio books have a poster image and that its artist and album_artist tags are set to the author. Where appropriate, the audio book should also contain chapter metadata.
  • Download and install the Audnexus agent;
  • Create a music library on Plex by adding the audio book folder, and set the agent to Audnexus
Note the Agent setting
  • Ensure that the advanced option of “Store track progress” is checked.
Ensure that Store Track Progress is checked!

Each book in the library will be represented as an album, and the author will be mapped to album artist. Once the library is created, you can download and play the audio books from the desktop using the Plex app. However, the more common use case is to listen to the audio books while on the go.

Using Prologue to Play Audio Books

We first have to download the Prologue App. I did not get any of the In-App premium functionality, and just stayed with the free version.

Point the app to my Plex server’s URL, and all the audio books from the library should now be accessible and playable on the iPhone or iPad with chapter, bookmark, and last-left-position support.

This is a really neat solution, and I am impressed how Plex and Prologue together formed a dynamic duo in this manner.

A Weekend Programming Challenge

My wife and I were watching  Lighter & Princess (点燃我，温暖你). In episode 5, a smart programmer completed a heart animation as part of a programming test in a university course. Everyone of his classmates had a mediocre and simplistic implementation.

My wife challenged me to do the same. I could have done this with SVG and Javascript, but I took the opportunity to learn more Python and Qt. The latter I have not used at all and was always curious how well it worked with Python. I decided to use the PyQt package instead of the PySide package.

I hacked this together today resulting in this rendition:

Click above to see it in action

The PyQt implementation worked really well across Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Linux. I suppose the Javascript and SVG would have done the same, but I learned something new in this case.

The source code and the installation instructions are at:

Click above to goto GitHub