Audio Book mode

Hello,

I was wondering if there was any possibility of incorporating audio books into XBMC? I did some searching and found two very short threads that were made in 2008 that brought up audio books, but nothing was ever followed up on them. I really don't know how they would be implemented as I am not a programmer, but for someone to take up the task here a few ideas.
They would be in an audio format (mp3, flac, ...etc) and probably split up into different parts or chapters. They could have a bookcover as the folder.jpg and the possibility of a writeup of the author for information. They would probably have to behave in a similar fashion as music does now, with the ability to resume like we can with videos now.
I think that this might be a nice addition for those of us who would like to relax or excercise in our movie room and perhaps listen to an audio book.
Is there any possibility for something of this type?
Thanks,
Mark

I have an audiobook collection attached to my XBMC deployment. Having a separate "Audiobook" section would be nice, but I am fairly satisfied with the way it works right now when used as part of the "Music" section. If anything, a content-type specification would be appropriate rather than an entire section.

Quote:They would be in an audio format (mp3, flac, ...etc) and probably split up into different parts or chapters.

Unfortunately, DRM-free audiobooks (such as those sold by EMusic or SimplyAudiobooks) are not always indexed by chapters. However, most of them are separated into parts using the "Track" tag which functions perfectly in XBMC Music.

Quote:They could have a bookcover as the folder.jpg

This works properly in the Music section.

Quote:and the possibility of a writeup of the author for information

One could probably add this using the tag system. However, to really do this correctly, a scraper would have to be developed and a source of Audiobook information amenable to scraping would have to be found.

Quote:with the ability to resume like we can with videos now

Now this is definitely interesting. Frankly, this is a feature we could using in the Music section as a whole. Resume should happen at the album level, thereby remembering what song or audiobook track was last played as well as the time index at which it was stopped.

I would be interested in having this as well

While I do like audio books I somewhat fail to see the need for it in a HTPC environment. Then again the Media Center experience is slowly working its way into the portable market as well.

Even though I don't have much of an interest in doing the coding for it here are my thoughts on the matter regarding implementation

Initially I would say that a great start for this would be to introduce the concept of content to the music section, thus making the current music library more of a general purpose audio library. This works fine in the video and seems appropriate here. I would argue that this would make XBMC more consistent between video and music and give the user a simpler way to select different scrapers based on content / folder. So even if an audio book content would be considered terrible the consistency alone would be very usable.

When xbmc has a concept of content in the music section it would be possible to disregard audio book content in party mode and we could save current location of the song when audio is said content. Allowing resume on audio book content would then also be applicable and finally presenting the books differently based on the content.

Cheers,
Tobias

Just putting my name on the list of those who would likely use this if a developer gets interested in working on it.

As suggested above, I'm going to try just adding this into my current music section for now and see how that works out.

Thanks,
daemox

We almost have it.

See here

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=86753&page=12

Having audio book support in XBMC has been a sort of holy grail for me.

I am partially disabled and spend a lot of time listening to audio books, it would be just brilliant to be able to do so in my living room. Obviously the facility to resume playback/bookmark is essential. I did get XBMC to play an .m4b file but with no bookmarking.

If it happens I would love it

Gifton

i love this idea to

+1 to this idea.

Not only would I like to see resume enabled, we (ok, I) desperately need a StepForward/StepBack function in the music player. While I don't listen to a lot of audiobooks, I do crank my share of podcasts and the ff/rew is not well suited to long audio files.

Would love to pitch in any way I can to get this working (beta testing or otherwise). Hopefully the demand is sufficient to get this on the roadmap

thanks
jm

+1, Different Bookmarking System in each audiobook folder.