Audiobooks - Only Capture First Chapter

[Howdy_McGee]

Hello,

I have my setup pretty standard but am running into issues:

Author > Book > Chapter 1.m4b, Chapter 2.m4b, etc.

In some books, it captures all the chapters, but in others, seemingly at random, it only captures the first chapter. I've tried regenerating the metadata on the library but it doesn't seem to catch it.

[TheDreadPirate]

Double check the file permissions. I've attempted to replicate, but the only way was for jellyfin to not have permissions to read the file.

[Howdy_McGee]

The permissions seem fine. Same as another working audiobook as far as I can tell.

I've moved Chapter 1 out of the book folder, refreshed the metadata for the book, and it picked up on Chapter 2, but not Chapter 3+. It plays the chapter fine all the way through, then just stops since it's unable to find the next chapter. I move Chapter 1 back in, refresh the metadata, and it plays Chapter 1 but not Chapter 2+.

This isn't happening to _all_ my audiobooks, but at least 45%. Could it have something to do with the files being M4B files?

[TheDreadPirate]

ALL of my audiobooks are M4B, but they are all one file per book. I came across some public domain audiobooks that are broken up into chapters. I'm going to check those out and attempt to replicate your issue.

Could you share your logs with us? Preferably one that contains one of these scan attempts.

[TheDreadPirate]

Again, I attempted to duplicate but had no issues getting all the chapters to detect. Getting the naming right was another story (JF uses the embedded title). I tried converting the media between m4b, mp3, and flac. All were detected.

I will definitely need to see your logs for the scans to see what is going on. And what OS is your server running?

[Howdy_McGee]

Ok, here's what I got:

I have a Asustor AS5402T running the Jellyfin app. I'm not certain of the OS specifics.

Here are the logs I have after trying to resync a specific book: Pastebin Jellyfin Logs
The NAS has a static IP of 192.168.1.19 and I'm seeing references to "192.168.1.9" in the logs, I'm not sure why or how to fix that.

Here is the Network Config: Pastebin Jellyfin Network Config

[TheDreadPirate]

192.168.1.9 is probably one of your clients.

Nothing problematic in your log. But the lack of error messages regarding the missing chapters still points me to some weird permissions issue. I don't know enough, or anything, about Asustor to help you with that.

You know your system better than I do. What I can tell you is that there is nothing wrong with Jellyfin based on that log.

[Howdy_McGee]

I'm not necessarily looking for a reply on this one, it's such a weird niche issue but I did want to add in further information in case it helps someone at some point for some reason.

I've reached out to the Asustor Jellyfin App author who claims to just wrap the latest version of Jellyfin in an acceptable format that Asustor expects so it can be recognized as an installable app. They don't do any modifications to the core Jellyfin codebase.

I have the following Audiobook structure:

Problem:
William Peter Blatty > The Exorcist > (01) Opening Credits - The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty.m4b
William Peter Blatty > The Exorcist > (02) Prologue - The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty.m4b

With the above, if I look at the Admin > Metadata Manager, I see that the system does not recognize the core folder, only the first file. Now, if I remove "The Exorcist" from the audio file names, refresh the metadata, everything appears correctly everywhere.

Working Example 1:
William Peter Blatty > The Exorcist > (01) Opening Credits - The Foobar - William Peter Blatty.m4b
William Peter Blatty > The Exorcist > (02) Prologue - The Foobar - William Peter Blatty.m4b

Working Example 2:
William Peter Blatty > The Exorcist > (01) Opening Credits - William Peter Blatty.m4b
William Peter Blatty > The Exorcist > (02) Prologue - William Peter Blatty.m4b

If I manually rename the files back, adding in "The Exorcist" to the filenames, and refresh the metadata the problem persists. That being said, I have many other audiobooks that follow the problematic format above, some with "The " in the title and others that don't, that do work as expected. It's still not clear to me why this is happening, but removing the title from the filenames and refreshing the metadata makes the directory recognizable again. The downside is that I lose out on the main Audiobook images. I'm not sure if it's AudioDB or MusicBrainz where it gets this info, but by removing the title from the audiofile itself it's not able to pull in the main Audiobook image.

I personally don't think it's a permissions issue at this point and think it's some kind of conflict between the file title, the file metadata, parent folder, and how Jellyfin recognizes that metadata (either through AudioDB or MusicBrainz).

[SaluSnikoS]

Hi!

I just registered to contribute to this, help others too, since it helped me realize what the issue was! Thanks @Howdy_McGee!!

First, I verified Howdy_McGee's findings. It seems that there's an issue with the naming of the audio files.

I'm using the Windows Jellyfin Server and I reproduced the issue as stated above. I then renamed the audio files, and everything worked like a charm.

So, I do believe that we have narrowed down the source of the issue to the naming of the audio files. More precisely, when the audio file contains the name of the parent folder, then only the first audio file is shown on the client/metadata manager.

i.e.:
Z:\0_media\books\Frank Herbert\Dune\Frank Herbert - (1).mp3 -> WORKS
Z:\0_media\books\Frank Herbert\Dune\Frank Herbert - Dune (1).mp3 -> DOES NOT WORK

I've tested it with 10 different audio books/file name combinations.

I hope this can be fixed somehow, otherwise we need to start renaming!

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EDIT: 31/Mar

Even if all of the audio files are now listed on the client side, there's no way of distinguishing between chapters(files). All of them have the same representation...