Setting up your library

Setting up your library

A library folder is a folder on the server that My Audiobook Collection is allowed to scan. You can add as many as you like, and they can live on different shares or disks.

The two kinds of library folder

Each entry has an Is a Genre tick behind it, and it changes what the folder means:

Is a Genre	The folder is	Its children are
off	a folder that holds genre folders, e.g. /audiobooks	genres
on	one genre, e.g. /audiobooks/Fantasy	authors

Leave it off and add the parent when everything under /audiobooks is a genre folder. That is one entry and it stays right when you add a genre later.

Turn it on, one entry per genre, when the parent also holds folders the app should not read: a downloads folder, a _Temp, an incomplete rip, a folder of music. This is the reason the tick exists.

What happens if you get it wrong

Add /audiobooks/Fantasy without ticking Is a Genre and the app reads one level too deep: your authors land in the Genres column, and their books appear as authors. A scan notices this — a folder whose children look like author folders, not genre folders — and says so in the bar at the bottom:

…/Fantasy looks like a single genre folder, so its authors are being filed as genres. Tick "Is a Genre" behind it in Settings, or add the folder that contains your genre folders instead.

Fix the tick and scan again. Nothing on disk was touched, only the database.

Adding a folder

Settings → Library folders:

• Type a path and press Add, or
• press Browse… and walk the disk. The list shows only directories, and hidden ones (starting with a dot) are left out. Use as library takes the folder you are standing in.

Remember that you are browsing from inside the container: the audiobooks you mounted at /audiobooks are at /audiobooks, whatever their path on the host.

Press Save. Changing the list of library folders starts a scan by itself, since the answer to "what is in my collection" just changed.

Scanning

Scan library in the header reads your library folders and updates the database. The bar at the bottom shows the folder being read and how many books have been found, and the button stays grey until the scan is done.

With more than one library folder, the pulldown beside the button chooses what it will do: Scan all libraries, or Scan one of them by name. Scanning one folder only touches the books inside it — a book missing from that folder is dropped from the library, and the other folders are left exactly as they are. With a single library folder the pulldown stays out of the way.

What a scan does:

• adds books it has not seen, with their tags, cover art and track list
• updates the metadata of books it has seen
• removes books whose folders are gone
• records, per book, which tags the files themselves carry — that is what the badges and the Needs tags list are built from

What a scan does not do: change a single byte on disk. It only reads.

Books you import, move or delete through the app are put in or taken out of the database immediately, so you do not have to rescan a 1,000-book share to see one new book.

Scans are safe to repeat, and only one job runs at a time. Whichever button started the job greys out until it is done — the scan button, Write into MP3s on a book or in the Needs tags list, Put back in the trash — and so does everything else that would start work. Playing a book and marking one listened stay available throughout.

Jobs that do overlap — a scan another browser started while this one reads the import folder — each get their own bar at the bottom, side by side, so no bar ever shows two jobs at once.

A bar fills from the colour of the glow on the left of the page into the colour of the glow on the right, so it stands in the same pair the page does. Those two turn over every night, the way the drawn covers do, and a bar still running at midnight turns with them.

Genres

A genre is a folder, so making a genre means making a folder. Settings → Genres lists the genre folders it knows, with the path behind each, and offers a row to create one: the folder it goes in, then the name.

Creating a genre:

• makes the folder if it is not already there, and
• adds it as a library folder with Is a Genre ticked, if your libraries are single genre folders. When your library is the parent folder, the new genre is inside it already and needs no entry of its own.

Either way the genre is available for an import straight away, without a scan. An empty genre folder does not appear in the Genres column — that column counts books — but it is offered wherever you choose a genre.

Genres also appear on their own when you take Google's genre for a book; see Metadata and tags.

Where My Audiobook Collection keeps its own files

Everything My Audiobook Collection owns lives in /data:

• library.db — the collection, users, playback positions, listened marks and the trash record
• covers/ — cover images pulled out of the files or downloaded from Google

Your audiobooks are never copied there. Deleting /data loses your positions and listened marks, not a single audiobook, and a rescan rebuilds the rest.