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A small, self-hosted web app that turns a folder of audiobooks into a collection you can browse, play and keep tidy. It reads the folders you already have — Genre → Author → Book, Genre → Author → Series → Book, or, for an author who publishes a series in parts, Genre → Author → Series → Part → Book.
Three things are what it is for:
It writes the metadata into your MP3s. Not into a database that only its own interface can read — into the files themselves, where every other player, phone and car stereo will find it. It shows you, per book and in green, which tags the files carry, so you can always tell what is real from what is only on screen. What is missing it fills in from the Google Books API or from what you type, and then puts it where it belongs. See Metadata and tags.
It turns .m4b and .ogg into MP3, a chapter to a track. Tags only go into
MP3s, so the books in other formats were the ones that could never be finished.
Converting is how they join the rest: one .m4b of thirty chapters becomes
thirty named, numbered tracks, and what it came from is kept until you say
otherwise. See Converting to MP3.
It plays them, in the browser, and remembers where every person got to in every book — including while you walk around its own pages. See Browsing and listening.
It runs as one Docker container, or in a Proxmox container made by one command, with an SQLite database beside it. No cloud, no external service beyond the metadata lookup you enable yourself.
| If you want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| get it running on your server, in Docker | Installing on Unraid |
| get it running on Proxmox, in a container of its own | Installing on Proxmox |
| take a newer version when one is out | Installing on Proxmox |
| point it at your audiobooks | Setting up your library |
| know how your folders are interpreted | How your folders are read |
| find a book by anything you remember about it | Browsing and listening |
| listen, and keep your place | Browsing and listening |
| see which volume of a series you are missing | Browsing and listening |
| fix missing titles, covers and years, and write them into the files | Metadata and tags |
| get a book out of Needs tags that is not an MP3 | Converting to MP3 |
| file newly downloaded books, and choose between two copies of one | Importing audiobooks |
| reorganise, throw away, or find books whose files went bad | Moving and deleting |
| let others use it without breaking it | Sharing with others |
| show the collection in Home Assistant, and play a book on a speaker | Home Assistant |
| browse and play the books from Music Assistant | Music Assistant |
| tidy up cover files, or read what a field does | Settings reference |
| work out why something is off | Troubleshooting |
- Start the container with your audiobooks mounted at
/audiobooksand a folder for its database at/data. On Proxmox, one command does all of that — Installing on Proxmox. - Open
http://your-server:8523. It has no administrator yet, so nothing in it opens until you make one: a name and a password of at least eight characters. That account is the one that approves everybody else. -
Settings ▾ → Library and maintenance → add
/audiobooksas a library folder → Save. - Scan library. The bar at the bottom counts the books as it finds them.
- Pick a genre on the left, an author next to it, and press ▶ Play.
There are two front doors, and which one you hand out matters:
-
/— the bare address: browsing, playing and remembering positions, nothing else. This is the one to share. It carries an Admin button for you. -
/admin— the page that can change things: scanning, importing, tagging, moving, deleting.
The old addresses, /listen.html and /index.html, still answer with a redirect,
so a bookmark or a link you handed out keeps working. On either page, the name of
the app in the header leads back to the shelves.
Both pages are closed to anybody who has not signed in — not by hiding buttons, but by the server refusing the requests. There is always an administrator: on a fresh install the first page asks you to make one, and until one exists nothing in the app answers at all. See Sharing with others.
- It does not move or rename anything on its own. Every file operation is one you asked for: an import, a move, a delete, a tag write.
- It does not download audiobooks, and has no catalogue of its own to browse.
- It writes tags into MP3 files only. Other formats are read, listed and played, but never written to — Converting to MP3 is the way to bring one of those books over.
- It never converts, moves or writes anything on its own. Every one of those is a button you pressed, on a book you chose.
