GET AUDIOBOOKS

Wondering how to populate your audiobook server with great reads? You have three main sources. First, if you have an existing Audible collection, you need to download and convert your audiobooks into MP3 format using a tool like OpenAudible (£19.95, https://openaudible. org). Second, there are free sources of public domain audiobooks – mostly out-ofcopyright classics – like

LibriVox (https://librivox.org)

and Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).

The final option is to rip your own purchased audiobook CDs. One word of warning – books are often chopped into lots of short tracks, which can result in lots of files. That’s not a problem for Audiobookshelf,

but if you’d prefer to keep things simple (such as one file per CD or chapter), you need a solution that stitches multiple tracks together, like Fre:ac (https://freac.org). To make this work, when ripping your disc, select the tracks you wish to combine and tick Encode To Single File before clicking the Encode button.

While you can manually tag your files if you wish, Audiobookshelf can do the hard work for you – including obtaining cover art. All you need to do is make sure your files are organised correctly, adhering to the following basic folder structure: Author > Series > Title > files

The Author folder supports various naming types, from First Last (such as Stephen King) to Last, First (King, Stephen), and Title folders can be named various ways, too – go to www.audio bookshelf.org/docs and select Directory Structure under Books for details.