Audnexus.bundle VS audiobookshelf

https://github.com/djdembeck/Audnexus.bundle gets you meta-data updating.

Also I noticed Audiobook.bundle is no longer being actively worked on and has been moved to a different project, Audnexus. If you want to try it, I would use Audnexus because it has a release in March.

If you don't know about Plex, it's a service where you set up your own media server. It's not designed with Audiobooks in mind but I created a Music Library and only put Audiobooks in it. Plex is great and for regular media it will scan all your files and organize it and all the the details, summaries, catalogue and everything as if it were a regular streaming services; but since it's not designed for audiobooks you need to add an audiobook source for it to pull details from. I added Audnexus as my source, it works great.

Third-party metadata agents/scanners still work (e.g. Audnexus is a popular one for getting better audiobook metadata), but there are very few others that do. Ones that relied on their own UI (e.g. anything that integrated with services like Spotify, YouTube, etc) don't work anymore, and haven't for 4+ years. You'll see their entry in the Plugins menu in your server settings, but you can't do anything beyond that because the UI it relied on was removed.

Yes, it's fairly common. In lieu of "official" support, the third-party agent Audnexus can help with organizing things, pulling from online databases that the regular Plex Music agent doesn't (e.g. Audible), and setting tags that can help with navigation (e.g. setting the Style to the narrator, so you can filter to specific narrators).

For anyone who's game to run another service for audiobooks, I've found Audiobookshelf to be pretty good: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf

A spotlight on AudioBookshelf, an audiobook and podcast streaming server

The basics are same across most any container, you probably need to map some network ports, and map some storage paths, and then you are pretty good to go. There can be more than that, but those are kind of the minimums. For instance, the example compose file for audiobookshelf does just that, maps a port, and some storage and that's about it.

linky: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf#readme (JS; GPLv3) and they have their own app, too: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf-app#readme (Capacitor GPLv3)

Move away as in find another audiobook vendor? Or simply retain access to your existing collection?

Audiobooks from Audible can be downloaded via the UI. They will have DRM, but it's possible to remove.

If you have audiobook files without DRM you can listen to them via any app that plays audio, but there's also at least one OSS project that aims to fill audiobook UI niche [1].

[1]: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf

Using Audiobookshelf (https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf) and hosing my own podcast with an rss feed. It works just perfect in other podcast apps but in Pocket Casts, that used to work, I can't no longer see new episodes starting from about a week ago. I have never been able to stream the episodes either, just download and listen, this also works in iOS Podcaster app.