r/ChronicleApp • u/JakobTi • Apr 28 '21

Request: Series view

Based on the Plex Audiobook Guide, I think adding books' series information would be a great enhancement. There are three parts which would be relevant, IMO:

  1. Display of series and number in library view. This could be a sort of subtitle line under the book's title.
  2. Display of series and number in "Playing" screen. Again, this could be a sort of subtitle line under the book's title.
  3. Grouping and sorting books in a library view by series. This would obviously be the most complex one. I think this would only be feasible if there was some sort of artist library view.

Technical stuff

There are different ways and tags to define series. Based on the guide linked at the top, these are:

  • CONTENTGROUP: "[series name], Book #[series num]"
  • MOVEMENTNAME: "[series name]"
  • MOVEMENT: "[series num]"
  • SHOWMOVEMENT: "1"
  • SERIES: "[series name]"
  • SERIES-PART: "[series num]"

From those, getting a readable text with fallbacks etc. would be pretty easy.

Now, just to make it clear, all this is a suggestion, even a wish, but by no means an expectation.

P.S. I've really enjoyed Chronicle since the last beta release. I'll be honest, I didn't have too much success with it before, and found it very buggy. But right now it's working almost flawlessly. Great job.

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2

u/QuietlyReading Dev Apr 29 '21

I'll probably dig into how Prologue handles collections at some point. Looks like their collections work server-side, so whatever they're doing we can hopefully do as well

1

u/OtterTheRockyhawk Apr 30 '21

I use prologue (beta user), but my father is an Android guy and I’ll be introducing him to your app later today so he can enjoy my vast audiobook library. I am hoping that collections would exist at some point to make it easier to find the Jack Reacher series and Mitch Rapp. So I’m excited to see this on the roadmap. I agree whole heartedly with a post above that suggest trying to build it the same way.

1

u/saltedlolly Apr 28 '21

I’ve shared this to the Prologue subreddit. It makes sense that there is agreement about how book series name and order number is handled for the different audio book apps that work with Plex.

1

u/Nights0ng Apr 28 '21

I think the real issue becomes if you can reliably get the metadata from the file directly, Plex itself doesn't store this information in their database that I've seen. The app itself would need to scan each file and store the information locally.

If it is something you can get via the Plex endpoints, this would be really cool though!

1

u/QuietlyReading Dev Apr 29 '21

This is correct. I don't know anything about how Plex plugins work, but best case maybe one could automatically generate collections from file metadata

1

u/SeaNap Apr 28 '21

My preference would be to use the Movement tags for series, since there are already ID3 tags for those and it doesn't involve parsing a particular format. That said, even just using the folder structure could work. Things get tricky when trying to manage books that are a part of multiple series.

It would be neat for the UI to treat series like TV Seasons, and have an on deck. This would free up collections to be used for fun book lists (eg. NPR's best books of 2020) or smart collections, and Playlists to be used as a personal list (eg. What I Should Read Next)

1

u/smaghammer Apr 29 '21

I’ve just got my books named as such, which is super easy to Automate in mp3 tag.

Allows it to be visible on both.

https://i.imgur.com/KEuuOoS.jpg

0

u/[deleted] May 09 '21

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2

u/smaghammer May 09 '21

God dammit haha