How does Listenarr metadata get picked up in Audiobookshelf?

[djjudas21]

I've been using Audiobookshelf for a while with a manual collection. I recently started using Listenarr and I have some questions about metadata.

I search for a book in Listenarr, it grabs some metadata including the narrator, the cover art, etc. Then it downloads and writes those files into my audiobook directory.

Audiobookshelf is looking at the same directory, picks up the new book but in some cases has misidentified the book, grabbed different metadata with a different narrator and got different or even wrong cover art. Obviously I can fix these things manually in Audiobookshelf, but ideally I would like the matching to be done at download time with Listenarr, and for Audiobookshelf to be a passive consumer of metadata.

Can Listenarr be configured to write metadata into the audio files by ID3 tags or similar? Or somehow pass an ID that Audiobookshelf can pick up?

It doesn't help that a lot of the ebooks on torrent sites are badly encoded, badly tagged, or otherwise incomplete.

[therobbiedavis]

Hi there @djjudas21, yes eventually what you described is the goal. I want to provide an option for users to write the metadata connected to the download to their files either pre/post import and/or manually.

[maconly34]

Like you, I’ve been using Audiobookshelf for years, and I still have the problem of incorrect metadata when importing.
The same thing happens when the scan is done after adding a title via Listenarr: the author is replaced by the narrator, and so on.
Thank you for planning to add Listenarr metadata to Audiobookshelf in the future.