Going beyond ebooks - continued
I've decided against using Calibre for
music, and I'm looking for some nice music library & player solution. I might be too picky, as I've tested six applications or so today, and haven't fallen in love with either of them

(any tips would be appreciated

).
I'm still thinking about using Calibre for
movies; I really like fidvo's ideas. Still not sure what to do with subtitles, though. Embedding subtitles doesn't appeal to me as I would prefer to keep the original files.
For the same reason I've decided against converting audio books into a single file. But... I do have an
audiobooks Calibre library, as of yesterday
I chose the 'zip' approach and added zipped audiobooks to the records. Each record is one audiobook, and the zipped file includes a folder with files (so if I unpack the zip, I will have the full folder name, not the shortened Calibre version).
The use of zipped files might not be the most convenient one (e.g. when I open the file in Windows Explorer, I can't see the length of the files like in the case of audio files in regular folders) but I don't have many audiobooks nor do I send them to devices / listen to them very often. Unzipping a couple of them once in a while should not be a lot of hassle.
The advantages (in comparison to the 'one audiobook = one series' approach and to audio managers):
clear and nice overlook of my collection, very intuitive (one book = one audiobook), no need to 'clean' the folders, edit file tags etc. (I'm a big fan of using MP3Tag for music but never cared about the metatags for my audiobooks). Furthermore, when I find some time to go through my CD collection, I'm going to add 'empty records' for the audiobooks - and this seems much more convenient if one record = one audiobook.
Hopefully, in a couple of months I'll be just as happy about this solution as I am today
One question: what kind of custom column and number format would you use for the length of an audiobook? Right now, I am entering the number of minutes but something like 2 h 56 min / 2:56 would probably be nicer (whereas I want to keep the option to sort the audiobooks by length). Any thoughts?
Although I'm pretty happy with the .zip solutions for audiobooks, I'm not particularly eager to use .zips for my '
language learning materials' library. As I've written before, the library would include various courses, language books etc. The biggest problem is that I have materials of various kinds and frequently there are multiple files of one format (e.g. audio or a couple of pdfs - a book, an anwswer key etc.). I also tend to store my notes in the folder with a given course.
It's a pity that Calibre, with its one file per format policy, does not support natively the option of adding (additionally) one 'folder' item per book. This would be great for all kinds of additional stuff one may want to store with a book.
Looking for some workaround, I'm thinking about having a folder for my 'language files', stored in subfolders, making shortcuts to these subfolders and adding them (as .lnk files) to Calibre.
Has anyone tried this? This would obviously work on Windows only (but this doesn't bother me). A fix letter drive would be absolutely necessary.
Any ideas what folder structure should I use for those 'external files'? (I would probably want to treat them as a 'black box', i.e. open the subfolders only through Calibre).
What's the screwup potential?
Using relative paths would probably be much better - do any other workarounds come to your mind?
Quote:
Originally Posted by fidvo
That's why if I ever do write the plugin, it's not likely I'll upload it here. Inevitably people would (rightly) complain because it doesn't handle the way they manage their recipes.
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I wish I was capable of writing custom scripts and plugins, and adjusting Calibre to my needs