• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • yes that is correct. it is a server/client solution so you can track you progress.

    zero finding ability. try Lazy Librarian.

    remember that audiobooks are relatively rare due to their high production costs. so a lot of books do not have an audio version. Could consider text to speech.

    there are some massive torrents that have like thousands of audiobooks in them and you have to go and select which ones to download. I’m not sure how I stumbled on these in the past so if you figure that out let me know.










  • Ya I mean I understand at the end of the day the devs have the prerogative to run their project as they please. And it’s smart to have a constrained set of requirements rather than trying to be all things to all people. There’s always a cost to flexibility.

    I serve my TV and movies from jellyfin and it is not as prescriptive. As an imperfect workaround, the additional files can be put into a separate directory that sonarr/radarr doesn’t have access to but jellyfin does.

    For books, calibre tips the balance completely in the other direction of total flexibility. It’s very powerful and with the right skills it can be made to do all kinds of tasks. But it’s hardly the smooth initial experience of the arrs.

    From my experience, the most comprehensive and robust metadata harvester is the citation manager Zotero. They have spent a lot of work on building a metadata system that is both easy to use but accounts for different versions of the same work. In academic writing you need to cite the actual document you used because it could change over time, editions, etc. Instead of making their own database, they use various 3rd party collections. And of course you must be able to customize or create items for scholarly work. There is about 15 years of chat on their forums/repos of people arguing how to best identify and apply the appropriate metadata and it’s not at all smooth going even there.


  • The whole collection of software forces the user to limit themselves to the single version of canonical media which has been officially sanctioned by a centralized authority.

    The more mainstream and corporate your media and arts interests are, the less you will notice this problem. But even with TV and movies it is a barrier once you deviate. With music and books, which due to lower production costs are literally endless in number, variations, mixes, imprints, translations, editions, covers, releases etc, it is an impossible model.

    I don’t know if it’s too much inference but I sort of feel bad for the developers. This assumption about the superiority of homogeneous media and art pervades the projects in a way which suggests it is completely invisible to them. It’s very bleak.