GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 412842
Audiobook support
Last modified: 2018-05-24 12:23:40 UTC
Audiobooks are distinct from musical albums in the way the listener interacts with them. Audiobooks are expected to be listened to in order, with the separation into tracks less relevant than for music. Also, position in audiobooks is important; one's position in the chapter needs to be kept between sessions. Finally, audiobooks are treated differently by the iPod. I guess we want an "Audiobooks" source, under the "Library" group (since bug 359740 got checked in).
Are there ways to distinguish audio book files from other regular audio files? e.g. tags? Audible.com supplies audiobooks, but they use a closed proprietary format and there are no players that work under Linux that I know about. Are there any other non-closed formats that audiobooks are supplied in (other than plain mp3)? I suppose the most likely format we would have to deal with is simply mp3 files that happen to be tagged as audiobooks somehow (either internally or explicitly by the user).
iTunes treats audio/mp4 files as audiobooks if they have a .m4b extension (instead of .m4a). Obviously that's a hopeless hack; we should support it, but it won't work for other formats. Tags won't work; the genre tag needs to be reserved for the genre of the material. Having a toplevel filesystem folder (~/Audiobooks) might work, and we can always implement drag-and-drop between the sources.
Would this require a new mime-type? Also, most m4b files have support for "chapters": http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163546#c7
Yes, currently true m4b files aren't recognised at all: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10181 Re chapter, bookmark support etc.: nice, for future once we get the source in.
Aren't audiobooks downloaded from the Apple iTunes store encumbered with all that silly DRM FairPlay stuff? Are there stores that sell (or other downloadable locations) that are in open formats playable by gstreamer?
Yeah, lots. If it's open audiobooks you're after, look at http://librivox.org (mp3 and ogg); also Gutenberg has audiobooks in lots of formats including MP4 (named .m4b, but mostly with m4a magic) and Speex.
Example: Art of War audiobook on Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20594
(In reply to comment #7) > Example: Art of War audiobook on Gutenberg: > http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20594 Ah right, good. Thanks. I was wondering specifically whether there were any freebooks that used the Apple .m4b "hack" which seems to be the only format that is potentially (if hackish) programmatically distinguishable from normal audio files such as OGG, MP3 etc. I thought that maybe using a format based on the .m4p would necessarily entail the FairPlay DRM crap.
Very useful site for reference: http://aldoblog.com/audiobooks/
Would it make sense to have separate import dialogs for the Audiobook source and the Music source, or would a check box ("This is an audiobook") in the dialog be a better choice?
*** Bug 514180 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/rhythmbox/issues/333.