TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR AUDIOBOOKS
Rip, convert, and stream your audiobook collection to any device, with Nick Peers.
Rip, convert, and stream your audiobook collection to any device, with Nick Peers.
When it comes to media, your PC has everything covered, right? There’s Kodi, Plex, or Emby for starters, managing your music, movies, and TV with aplomb. Except there’s something missing…
Everyone loves a good story, and audiobooks (along with radio-style dramatisations) provide an easy way to devour books when focused on other tasks, whether driving long distances or tweaking your PC’s hardware. The obvious place to go for an audiobook fix is Audible, but it ties you into a proprietary ecosystem that requires you to purchase your books outright via one-off fees or a recurring subscription. Furthermore, you’re indebted to Audible’s own apps and servers for accessing your books. That’s fine if you’re a fan of paying for streaming services, but the likes of Plex, along with audio-only services such as Logitech Media Server, enable you to stay in complete control of your media, so why shouldn’t that be the case with audiobooks? There’s no reason. You can incorporate your audiobook collection into existing streaming services, but none of them quite hits the mark. Which is where we come in to help!.
In this exhaustive guide, we’ll start by bringing all your audiobooks – whether CD, free downloads, or purchased through Audible – under one roof. You’ll rip CDs exactly the way you want your books divided up, then tag your files consistently (complete with highquality embedded artwork) to make browsing, managing, and listening to audiobooks a pleasure.
Once your media is in place, we’ll reveal how to set up a dedicated audiobook server on your PC or NAS, enabling you to stream your audiobooks to any device in your home – or further afield if you want access on the go over the internet. There’s even offline access through your cell phone should you wish to be able to listen to your books in the most remote spots.
We’ve spent months developing this project, experimenting, tweaking, and tearing our hair out so you don’t have to. It’s time to give your audiobook collection the prominence it deserves, so simply turn the page to put our carefully crafted research to good use.
Your first step is to bring all your audiobooks under one digital roof. Start by creating a single folder – “Audiobooks” – somewhere accessible, such as inside your Music folder. Inside here you’ll store your audiobooks using the following folder structure: Collection\Author\Book. In other words, each book has its own folder, inside which your audiobook can be housed in multiple files (such as individual chapters, episodes, or parts), to aid navigation and playback.
As an aside, the Collection folder level is optional, designed to work with your audiobook server’s support for multiple users, so you can restrict access to books on a per-user level. More on that later.
Next, you want to migrate all your audiobooks into this folder structure. If you’re an Audible user (past or present), check out the box below on using OpenAudible to download DRM-free MP3 copies of your purchased books to incorporate into your new setup.
You can also obtain audiobooks from other online sources – books in the public domain (typically out-ofcopyright classics) have been narrated by volunteers and placed on various websites, many of which have been produced by LibriVox, so head to https://librivox.org to browse its catalog. Choose the “Whole book (zip file)” option to download the book as a series of MP3 files, one per chapter. Each file is tagged with author, title, and other key details, and you can also download cover art to embed into the files. More on verifying those tags and embedding the artwork later. For now, once downloaded, extract the contents of the zip file into your Audiobooks folder according to your folder structure: for example, Audiobooks\ Classics\Herman Melville\Moby Dick.
RIP YOUR AUDIOBOOK CDS
Another way to add audiobooks to your library is to rip them from CD. We recommend iTunes (install it through the Microsoft Store) for three reasons: It has a built-in audiobook library to avoid cross-contamination with your music; its CD lookup database includes many popular audiobooks, from Harry Potter to Stephen King; and it can join multiple tracks into a single file when ripping. This helps mitigate those audiobook CDs split into very short tracks to make them easier to navigate on CD players.
After installing, open iTunes, and insert your first audiobook CD. After a short pause, you’ll hopefully see the “CD Lookup Results” dialog appear, with at least one match to choose from. Select the first in the list, and click “OK.” Review how it’s named each track – ideally, you’ll see the chapters clearly marked, but if not, click the “Options” button (the cog next to the eject button), and choose “Get Track Names” to choose another from the list.
If you can’t tell which tracks correspond to specific chapters, doubleclick a track name to start playing it, to see if the chapters are spoken at the start of a track. Once identified, select all the tracks that make up chapter one, click “Options,” and select “Join CD tracks” – you’ll see the selected tracks are now all linked to indicate they’ll be ripped as a single file. Repeat for other chapters on this disc.
Before ripping, click “CD Info” to review the audiobook’s key metadata – you’ll also need to click this to manually enter the information if the CD lookup database found no matches. Verify the “Artist” is the author, and if necessary, tweak the audiobook title in the album field – or “album” name if it refers to multiple discs or parts. This needs to be identical across all the audiobook’s discs to ensure they’re ripped to the same folder. Use the “disc number” fields to specify the disc number. If the genre is currently set to “Spoken & Audio,” change this to “Audiobook,” unless it’s a dramatisation rather than a straight reading. Finally, verify the compilation box is unchecked before clicking “OK” followed by “Import CD.”
The “Import Settings” box pops up. Select “MP3 Encoder” for the “Import Using” box, and click “Custom” under
“Setting.” Audiobooks don’t require top-quality settings, so minimise the space they take up by setting the “Stereo Bit Rate” to 64kb/s. Leave the other settings as they are and click “OK” twice. Wait for the disc to be ripped, then repeat for any other discs in the audiobook set.
JOIN CHAPTERS
If you’re ripping a multi-disc audiobook, there’s a good chance some chapters will be split across two discs. You can either leave them as they are (say Chapter 10a and Chapter 10b) or use a
tool such as Free MP3 Joiner (www. convertaudiofree.com/free-mp3joiner.html) to combine them into a single file. Free MP3 Joiner is a tiny portable tool that doesn’t reconvert the files – it just stitches them together. Launch the app, then click the first “Browse” button to select the file containing the first half of the chapter before clicking the second “Browse” button to select the second half. Finally, choose a suitable output name (such as “Chapter 10”), and click “Join.” Once complete, click “Open Output folder” to verify the new file exists alongside the
original two, which you can now delete.
By default, iTunes rips all CDs to its own iTunes\iTunes Media\Music folder. Navigate here to find a folder named after your audiobook’s author. Open this to reveal the audiobook folder, which you should move to the Audiobooks\Collection\Author folder you made earlier.
TAG YOUR AUDIOBOOKS
Once you’ve ripped your first audiobook, you need to tidy up the tags. Because audiobooks use the same tagging system as your music files, you
have to “translate” author and narrator information to the correct music-based tags. First, you need a tagging tool – our go-to app is MP3Tag, which you can download and install (or run as a portable app) from www.mp3tag.de/en.
Launch MP3Tag and browse to Audiobook\Collection\Author. Highlight your audiobook folder and click “Select Folder” to open it. All your ripped files should appear in the main pane. Start by reviewing the universal tags in the left-hand pane: Select all the tracks and ignore “Title” (which says “
You can now turn to the files that make up your audiobook. Start with the “Track” field in the main pane (scroll right to access it) – this needs to be renumbered sequentially from top to bottom, and the quickest way to do this is to select all your tracks, then choose “Tools > Auto-numbering wizard.” Make sure ‘“Tracknumber” is checked and it’s set to begin at track number 1, then click “OK.”
Now review the “Title” field. Each title is an amalgamation of the titles of tracks you’ve joined. To change this manually, click inside the first title, then type your replacement title, and press Enter to move on to the next title. If, however, you simply want to name each title for its component chapter (Title-Chapter 01, Title-Chapter 02, and so on), speed things up by creating a custom action.
Select all your tracks and choose “Actions > Actions.” Click “New,” name your action group “Quick chapter titles” or something similar, and click “OK.” Click “New” again, and choose “Format value” as your action type, followed by “OK.” Select “TITLE” for the field, and type the following into the “Format string” box before clicking “OK”: %album% - Chapter $num(%track%,2)
Click “OK” again to return to the “Action groups” window, check “Quick chapter titles,” and click “OK.” You’ll see each title renamed accordingly: Book title- Chapter 01, Book title-Chapter 02, and so on. Don’t want the leading zero? Type %title% - Chapter %track% into the “Format string” box instead. The action can be duplicated and modified to replace “Chapter” with, say, “Episode” or “Part.”
Finally, we want to rename the file names. We’re using the convention “The Colorado Kid-01.mp3,” “The Colorado Kid-02.mp3,” and so on. Make sure all the tracks are selected, then choose “Convert > Tag-Filename.” You’re prompted to select a Format stringtype the following into the box, and click “OK”: %album% $num(%track%,2)
ADD ALBUM ART
Now your audiobook files are correctly tagged, there’s just one thing missing: artwork. To embed this into each file, select all your tracks, right-click the blank artwork box, and choose “Add cover.” Once selected, the artwork should appear in the box, at which point click “Save.”
We recommend adding a square image in JPEG format of the audiobook’s artwork that’s 600x600 pixels. Where can you get this? You could scan in your CD cover, or look online at https://images. google.com; type the title of the book along with “audiobook” and see what comes up. Click “Tools,” then “Size > Large” to filter out smaller images, then roll over each result to see what size image is available. Click one, then right-click it, and choose “View image” to bring it up in your browser. Save this to your Downloads folder, then open it in an image editor if necessary, to reduce its size to 600x600 before saving it in JPEG format, ready to embed into your file.
B UILD YOUR AUDIOBOOK LIBRARY
While it’s possible to keep your audiobook library on a single PC – see the box on building a local library – where’s the fun in that? Booksonic (http://booksonic.org) is an audiobook streaming server that enables you to stream audiobooks to any device on your network. It’s a fork of Subsonic, a well-known music streamer, so it can be used on a wide range of devices, including Android (Booksonic app, $3), iOS (SubStreamer, free), and Windows (MusicBee – see box, previous page).
Your main choice is where to install the server: There are installers for Windows and Linux if you want to host it on your
PC, or you can install a Docker image (https://hub.docker.com/r/ linuxserver/booksonic), as we did on our QNAP NAS via Container Station. Setup is simple on Windows: Run through the installer and it’s in place, set to auto-start with your PC. Rightclick its system tray icon and choose “Booksonic Control Panel” to start or stop it, and enable https for a secure connection (via port 4443 by default).
The Docker image comes with a full set of configuration instructions – on our QNAP, we copied our Audiobooks folder into the NAS’s shared Media folder, and created two “Volume from
host” instances under “Shared Folders” for /config pointing to Container/ booksonic/config and /audiobooks pointing to /Media/Audiobooks respectively. We also chose to point / config to Container/booksonic/config. Other than mapping port 4040 from the host to the container under Network, that was it.
CONFIGURE BOOKSONIC
Once set up, log into the Booksonic web interface: Open your browser and type “localhost:4040” if you installed it on your PC, or “192.168.x.y:4040” (substituting “x.y” with the correct part of your NAS’s IP address). You’ll see a login screen – enter “admin” for username and password, and click “Log in.” Read the “Getting Started” message and click to reveal a slide-out menu. Choose “Settings > Users tab” and pick “admin” under “Select user.” Check “Change password” and enter a new, strong password before clicking “Save.” You’ll be logged out – log in with the new password, then follow the advice in the final box to finish configuring the server.
Now you can switch attention to your clients – Subsonic desktop clients are thin on the ground (try Supersonic from the Windows Store), but you can access and play through your web browser or install a mobile app, such as the official Booksonic app on Android or SubStreamer on iOS.
Taking SubStreamer as an example, on first launch, enter your server’s URL plus port number (so “192.168.x.y:4400” for internal-only connections), and your username and password, and it connects, downloads data from your library, and enables you to browse and listen to it through a slick user interface – when prompted, click “Run Now” to perform a one-time optimisation. You can browse your library, play back from any title, and download books for offline access. You’ve created an Audible alternative that works with all your audiobooks, and is accessible from just about anywhere – well done!