Also, there’s an app called Prologue that adds audiobook support to Plex’s libraries. Or rather, it parses the metadata that Plex refuses to parse.

Basically, Plex doesn’t read audiobook metadata. It just refuses to. It can still play audiobooks, but it treats them like 250 hour long albums. Which is… Well… Not great. Especially when a single chapter can be 10-20 minutes long. But Prologue does parse metadata.

You log into Prologue with Plex, then it uses Plex’s remote access to actually read the audiobook files. Then it does its own metadata parsing directly on your phone. So the Plex server isn’t doing any extra work to serve the file, and no config changes are required on Plex’s end. But on your phone, you get nice pretty chapters, bookmarks, speed controls, etc…

I tried to get Audiobookshelf to work for a day or two. It just refused to read or write anything to my NAS. Everything was configured properly on the surface, and it appeared to work… But then it would lose my added audiobooks every time it restarted. After throwing myself at it for about two days, I gave up and found Prologue.

Thank you, friend. I do have two different personal libraries, but was unaware of the “external” libraries option.

I would welcome sharing libraries with you, if you were into such things.