This plugin is intended to add audiobook support to Calibre through the use of M3U playlists. I love the Calibre interface, and I have multiple libraries set up for many different purposes. One thing that has been a bit challenging for me, however, is using it for my audiobook collection. Calibre likes to treat each book format to be of a single file, however many audiobooks contain dozens or even hundreds of individual files. Archiving all of the audio files into a single zip archive has been one workaround that I've tried. The problem with this approach, however, is that you then need to unzip the archive in order to do anything with the audio, or to be able to share it with another application like iTunes.
This plugin gets around this limitation by having you store the audio files themselves elsewhere, outside of the Calibre library. Audiobooks are then added to the library through the use of an M3U file, which is a simple text playlist containing a path to all of the audio files. This then makes it easy to have as many files as you want associated with a single audiobook, and they are stored outside of any zip files and easily accessible.
The plugin helps make creating new M3U files, or adding M3U files to existing book entries easy. It can also import and export metadata information from the audio files themselves, including cover artwork. To make sure your M3U paths stay valid, it also has the capability to scan your existing M3U files to insure that there are no broken paths or duplicate files.
Main Features:- Dialog to create a new M3U format book from an audiobook directory
- Dialog to update or add an M3U to an existing book entry
- Import Metadata from audio files to Calibre
- Cover artwork
- Title
- Author
- Narrator
- Duration
- Total Size
- Sample Rate
- Bitrate
- Mode
- File Type
- # Files
- Genre
- Export Metadata to audio files from Calibre
- Cover artwork
- Title
- Author
- Genre
- Narrator
- Dialog to inspect the contents of any M3U file
- Duration configurable to be h:mm:ss format, or total seconds
- Total size configurable to be in megs, or bytes
- Support multiple narrators with ampersand delimited names
- Dialog to scan library for broken or duplicate audio file paths
Special Notes:- Audio file tag handling is all done using the excellent mutagen library.
- Help Documentation
- This is my very first attempt at a Calibre plugin, I really hope it works for you :-)