Getting started with coding

[ACGAuthor]

This probably isn't the place to bring this up, but since I don't really have any social life in coding circles (but I do in book circles) I thought I'd give it a shot.

I've never really learned how to program. I've been able to monkey-see/monkey-do some coding of game mods and so forth, by looking at mods other people had made, intuiting what the code was doing, and tweaking it to suit my own purposes.

But I've never built anything from the ground up, and there were always people around me working on similar projects just for the love of it who were happy to sort of mentor me until I understood what I was doing on my hobby horse project.

Now, however, I have a hobby horse that I don't have the skills for and don't really know how to go about acquiring those skills.

Long story short, I feel like there's a void where audiobook library management should be. Books (I'm on Mac) isn't going to do a satisfactory job of it. Calibre has an audiobook plugin, but from what I can tell, it looks like the emphasis there is on incorporating a player into Calibre, rather than on computer-side library management that transfers to and syncs progress with devices.

OpenAudible looks awesome in theory, but for some reason has no support for M4B audiobooks. It's focused on importing AAX or MP3 audiobooks only, and will only decrypt/export the AAX files as MP3. Since all my books are M4B, I haven't gotten far in exploring it.

Other pieces of audio library management software that I've tried seem mainly meant for music and just really don't have the features needed for BOOKS. Frankly if they handle books at all, it's mostly a lucky accident. Forget series management support or anything like that. The closest I've come to effective series management is to load my audiobook files into a podcast app and arrange them as episodes within a podcast.

I'm probably just being picky, but I feel like the only way I'm going to find a program to manage my files the way I want to is to do it myself. I just...have no idea where to begin. I have a whole outline of what I feel like an audio library management piece of software should do on one's computer and then how it should handle the files when syncing and transferring to a device-side app.

Since I'm a Mac user, and since Swift seems like a much more beginner-friendly language than Java (which is what OpenAudible--which is open source--is written in) and Xcode tries to make app development so easy, it seems like that would be a good place to begin (and if I need to expand to PC and/or non-Apple devices later, I can figure that out after I have my app built.)

The problem is, the internet is glutted right now with people trying to sell books and beginner courses to wanna-be app developers who are looking to make money in the app market. Which is awesome for them, but it makes it hard to find "my tribe" as it were, of people who are creating this sort of software for the love of it and want to help other people learn for the love of it as well. And I'm singularly intimidated by the thought of asking Serious Business Programmers for help when they're trying to make money and I'm just trying to learn enough to fill a void I see in one of my favorite areas of interest.

There are a lot of free courses out there (most of which are being made free in an effort to lure people into buying the books/courses) but honestly there are so many that I don't know where to focus and which one is going to get me where I need to go. Or if any of them are.

So...where does a person with social anxiety go to find a friendly, patient coding Yoda to help scratch a hobby-driven itch rather than attempting to make something to sell?

[pdurrant]

I'd recommend that you look at adding features to calibre rather than writing a completely new application.

calibre provides a cross-platform framework with database and GUI that will provide 90% of the functionality you need. All you'll need to add is the audiobook specific stuff.

And, of course, if developing for calibre, there's plenty of help at the calibre web site and in the calibre dev forums here.

And Python's a nice language.

[ACGAuthor]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'd recommend that you look at adding features to calibre rather than writing a completely new application.

calibre provides a cross-platform framework with database and GUI that will provide 90% of the functionality you need. All you'll need to add is the audiobook specific stuff.

And, of course, if developing for calibre, there's plenty of help at the calibre web site and in the calibre dev forums here.

And Python's a nice language.

All of that is true, and absolutely something I've considered. frankly it would be my preferred option, but I'm very concerned that the "audiobook specific stuff" is SO FAR outside the scope of what Calibre does (and has been very intentionally designed to do), that it really has no place in the Calibre project.

I mean, part of working with non-DRM encoded audiobooks is, for example, importing a batch of MP3 or M4A files, each one of which may be a chapter of a single book or just a chunk divided by an arbitrary size limit, then making sure those are sorted and metadata tagged so that they play in proper sequence, and then possibly converting them (whether by re-encoding or using pass-through file joining) to a single, chaptered M4B or MP3 file.

Since once of the things I saw when I first looked at Calibre as a possible option for handling my audiobook catalog is that it's meant to be "one file = one book" by design, the fact that some audiobooks come in multiple files(and many users require them to be that way, depending on their preferred method of listening) is right off the bat, outside the scope of what Calibre was designed to do.

My ideal program would also call up ffmpeg to re-encode, or possibly edit via pass-through, the metadata of audio files and maybe even "liberate" DRM-encrypted AAX files so that they can be used in other apps/devices. So there you're talking about incorporating a media file conversion program into Calibre and it's just...yeah.

I love Calibre with all my heart and think it's the best thing ever and I'm totally not worthy. But I'm not sure I'd get a very warm reception if I went to the Calibre developers and said "help me learn how to make your program do things it was never intended to do!"

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by ACGAuthor

I love Calibre with all my heart and think it's the best thing ever and I'm totally not worthy. But I'm not sure I'd get a very warm reception if I went to the Calibre developers and said "help me learn how to make your program do things it was never intended to do!"

You may be right. But I think the advantages of using the calibre framework might outweigh the hassle of working within its design parameters.

One file per book, yes, but couldn't you have your audio book import take all the files for an audio book and zip them up into one file? And have an audio book editor, which would display the component files in the zip file, and allow you to re-arrange the order and add/delete audio files?

(Unless you mean that you'd want the audio book in the same record as the ebook - but this would be a mistake, IMO. Audio books have different metadata, at the least the publication date, than the ebooks)

Clearly, the audio stored in calibre in the zip file should be in a lossless format, with the preferred format for each device being stored in the device info, with on-the-fly conversion when copying to the device from the zip file.

I suspect that lots of calibre users are also audiobook users.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ACGAuthor

All of that is true, and absolutely something I've considered. frankly it would be my preferred option, but I'm very concerned that the "audiobook specific stuff" is SO FAR outside the scope of what Calibre does (and has been very intentionally designed to do), that it really has no place in the Calibre project.

I mean, part of working with non-DRM encoded audiobooks is, for example, importing a batch of MP3 or M4A files, each one of which may be a chapter of a single book or just a chunk divided by an arbitrary size limit, then making sure those are sorted and metadata tagged so that they play in proper sequence, and then possibly converting them (whether by re-encoding or using pass-through file joining) to a single, chaptered M4B or MP3 file.

Since once of the things I saw when I first looked at Calibre as a possible option for handling my audiobook catalog is that it's meant to be "one file = one book" by design, the fact that some audiobooks come in multiple files(and many users require them to be that way, depending on their preferred method of listening) is right off the bat, outside the scope of what Calibre was designed to do.

My ideal program would also call up ffmpeg to re-encode, or possibly edit via pass-through, the metadata of audio files and maybe even "liberate" DRM-encrypted AAX files so that they can be used in other apps/devices. So there you're talking about incorporating a media file conversion program into Calibre and it's just...yeah.

I love Calibre with all my heart and think it's the best thing ever and I'm totally not worthy. But I'm not sure I'd get a very warm reception if I went to the Calibre developers and said "help me learn how to make your program do things it was never intended to do!"

many calibre users deal with with multiple MP3s audio books by adding an M3U playlist and keeping the MP3s elsewhere.

BR