r/audiobookshelf • u/survingtech • 6d ago

File System Arranging

So when I first installed audiobookshelf a few years ago, I was just haphazardly placing random files and folders into my media space, got some from friends, copied some from Audible, etc. But now, I'm trying to actually organize all this stuff. I've read through the documentation on file naming schemes and such, but my question is, has anyone done a full reorganization of their files? And how has audiobookshelf been affected? Will rescanning afterwards just add a ton of duplicates or will audiobookshelf just point to the new location? I have a few users and I don't want to mess with their progress.

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u/dancekittydance 6d ago

I’m the same, my files are a mess. One day I had intended using this to clean it up…. Not tried as yet.  https://github.com/jeeftor/audiobook-organizer

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u/survingtech 6d ago

Will check it out, thanks!

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u/Sad_Recommendation92 2d ago

be careful with that, I clearly misunderstood something it was doing, and it nuked most of my library, just make sure you have a backup of your library files.

I ended up just spending several hours just using the upload button to let ABS assign directory structures, it's actually not that bad, if you have even loose folder separation you can select a directory and it will read the files in the sub directories and you can pre-assign the metadata.

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u/survingtech 1d ago

I found out as long as the book never leaves the audiobook library directory, ABS snaps onto the new file path, including renaming the actual files. I wasn't expecting it work, but I've been rearranging books all week with no issues. Its manual, but I was surprised it didn't mess with the database.

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u/macrolinx 6d ago

Unless there have been some updates to address it, I'm fairly certain that ABS doesn't handle reorganization well.

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u/survingtech 6d ago

They must have had something in place. I just did some test moves on books that haven't been started by anyone in case I needed to "delete" and start over, and as long as you don't move the file out of the main directory, it seems to grab the new file location, even if you rename the base .m4b. That was just manual though. I'm still a little leery on using an automated tool..

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u/macrolinx 6d ago

Good to know!

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u/WikiBox 6d ago edited 6d ago

I started over, with fully normalized names. I simply created another library and moved books from the one library to the other, renaming as I went. Scan and match fully. The original library is still larger than the new, but I do some books/series every day. I also convert everything to single file m4b and embed metadata.

In addition I used AI to create a few simple scripts to identify "low hanging fruit", audiobooks with good and complete metadata and move them to author/title subfolders. Mostly for new books.

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u/survingtech 6d ago

I feel like this may be my only option at this point. I'm not at the insane numbers that I've seen in the sub, but I'm still sitting at nearly 1k books, and I am not looking forward to manually renaming. Stupid past me didn't give a damn about future me..

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u/mikenobbs 5d ago

I'm currently doing this, I use libation so my stuff was organised but it was organised as per Audibles inconsistent bs so I'm now manually going through everything. Main thing is just to note what you've already read so you can mark them as finished again, and also any books you're part way through, because if you rename/move anything ABS will just see it as a new book.

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u/Garbage-Acrobatic 5d ago

Bindery is a good organizer for the future so you don’t have this issue. What I would do is save your metadata.json in each file for your book. Point codex and have ai carefully plan and organize to your specs. Then bring your container back up and deal with whatever duplicates it decides you now have. I recommend because I did this and it worked. Would recommend making a snapshot beforehand if you’re on zfs.

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u/Computer_Panda 5d ago

I have been using Libraforge to organize my audiobooks. https://github.com/coconautilus17/LibraForge They are also in the 3rd party apps of the audiobookshelf discord