m4b-tool VS Audnexus.bundle

I’ve been using https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool for years to combine files into m4b, add cover and metadata. I also use iOS and prologue for listening.

MP3Merge, m4b-tool. This one is interesting for iOS users.

Look into m4btool (https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool). Audiobookbinder increases the m4b filesize. Followed this post for my own purposes: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/426094/convert-multiple-mp3-files-or-single-m4a-into-m4b-with-ffmpeg-and-afconvert

M4B-tool which wraps ffmpeg might be your best bet if you are planning on converting m4b’s.

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).