I have a number of Big Finish audio books that I’ve formatted to be a single track each. I have put the artist name and book name in the track metadata. If I then use Picard I have two problems… i) it won’t auto find the book so I have to look it up manually (I’ve checked the metadata has the right artist and book name from MusicBrainz but I still have to do a manual search) my example is Artist: Nicholas Briggs Album: Doctor Who The Sirens of Time ii) the bigger problem - I can’t update against any of the MusicBrainz entries as they are all multi track (or zero track). When I match the release it tells me I have an unknown track as I only have track 1. I can’t, for example, use track 1 from the found release to tag my book with only track 1. I can’t update only the album detail without matching all the tracks.
I have a number of these Big Finish books that I am trying to put on Plex. At the moment I’m having to manually add them to my repository one at a time and match them one at a time, otherwise I end up with a mess that I can’t fix. I realise this isn’t a MusicBrainz issue, as such, but Plex is using the MusicBrainz database to look up the audio books.
Any help on looking up and tagging a single, continuous, track album/audio book using Picard would be much appreciated.
As you have made your own non-standard rip, you need to hack a solution. I have some ripped albums like this with cue sheets. Picard will attempt a LOOKUP, but will not really know which track to attach the audio to if it does find the album. You’ll probably need a Lookup in Browser to find the book.
What I do is tag the track number to zero or 100. And then manually select it as track 1 to get MBID data, but only keep ALBUM data and remove all TRACK and RECORDING MBIDs. I then rename the track Name to mirror the album name.
Plex will probably hate it. See what happens. Is Plex happy to see just the Album MBIDs and no track details?
Thanks for your help. It helps a little as Plex will now recognise a book at a time for what it is. If I do two books and ask Plex to identify them both they come in as two tracks under the first book name that it identifies which is a little odd. I’ll just have to add, and discover them, a book at a time.
Separating them into different folders helps. Also, matching track 1 of the found audio book against my single track helps. Unfortunately I’ve reached a point where there is no track information for the audio books in MusicBrainz for any further titles e.g. the release - ‘Doctor Who The Gathering’ will only find entries with missing media. Picard won’t let me update from this. As the majority of Big Finish releases are missing in terms of not containing any tracks I’m having a rethink as to how I can catalog them.
In my experience Plex does its initial matching from folders, not file names/tags, so file/folder structure is more important than it usually would be
If you have the original download, it would be amazing if you could add the tracks! The majority of the Big Finish catalogue was added via script afaik, but that script didn’t have access to the tracks/the Big Finish website didn’t have that info.
If you have doctored the release, e.g. merged tracks, and that’s all you’ve got, it becomes tricky, because we want the MB release to reflect the purchased format. In that case you might have to have a rethink, indeed
I could use Audacity and split each book into the original, multiple track layout but I can’t see an advantage to it if it’s not going to be matched. My format contains embedded chapter positions and will resume where it left off if I decide to stop playing at some point and come back the next day. I don’t mind if it doesn’t get matched but I’m struggling at the moment as, even when I put different books in different folders, Plex is treating them as multiple parts of a single book/album.
I’ve done quite a lot of renaming for TV series and it’s always worked ok but Music is a different beast in Plex.
I’ll have a play with my Plex settings and see what I can do. I appreciate that this has gone off topic for Picard so apologies and thanks to you all for your help.
For those Big Finish editions, if you have the track count per disc, you could just add the CDs and call them track 1,2,3. That would then be enough for Picard to pick up from. No need to add the track lengths if you don’t have them.
If you have the actual CDs, then you can upload the DiscIDs and do it that way.
With Plex, will it accept a .nfo text file of some form in the directory? KODI will let you write a text file to describe an album ( NFO files/Albums - Official Kodi Wiki ) and I expect Plex has something similar.
I still don’t understand why Plex is so determined to treat them as multiple parts of a single book/album. It must be seeing something common to link them in the tags.
tldr: if you’re hours in, it’s still not making sense, and your head is about to explode, I’m happy to jump on Twitch or w/e and have a look, just shout out
My Plex works with the default MusicBrainz music folder structure, no issues yet.
If I set it to use metadata it works great out of the box too.
Same goes for audiobooks (so far, only been using it since they added that feature/library)
I feel like something funny is definitely going on. Something is being picked up as the same on your end - either in the ‘album’ folder or a ‘album’ tag.
I think I don’t follow 100% - currently you match your file to the first track in a multi-track release, if possible, and save? If I understand correctly?
I’m saying that you could add the original tracks (as @IvanDobsky says, you don’t have to be perfect, but you shouldn’t make up ‘fake’ tracks), and then use your ‘match to the first track’ workaround.
Alternatively, if they originally came as a single-file m4b (or whatever) from a digital source, you can definitely add a 1 track release! That would be the perfect scenario.
I’ve finally sorted out a solution. All the books I had contained the number of the book as part of the album name. This was enough for Plex to put all the titles under the first album name it found. Each one was displayed with a disc number of the actual Big Finish title number which is very odd e.g. DISC 66 Catch-1782. DISC 67 Dreamtime. Some strange matching going on there. I’ve changed the album name to be just the title, put each one into its own folder and Plex is happy to identify them correctly now. It insisted on matching metadata although the folder and file name structures were as recommended.
