How to Add Audiobooks to Calibre Library

Until now, I had to store my handful of audiobooks in my Kodi music library since it wasn't possible to add them to  Calibre alongside my other books, which wasn't very convenient not to have everything in the same place. Especially when you have the same audiobooks in other formats (digital or hard copies). But now, that's ancient history since Calibre's developer Kovid Goyal finally has implemented this missing functionality.

How to Add Your Audiobooks to Calibre

• Click on Add books - Add Empty Book (CTRL+MAJ+E).
  
  Thereupon you need to enter the number of books you wish to add, author's name, series title and book title (these options are especially helpful if you had a whole series or collection of books by a same author and wish to save the trouble of manually filling in these fields for each book) then click OK to valid.
  
  
• Your book is now displayed in the cover browser (or list depending of how you have configured Calibre to look like) and you may fill in the missing information by clicking on Edit metadata individually and proceed as you would for ebooks.
• Once done with the metadata, click on Add Books - Add data files to selected book entries then select all the audiofiles of your audiobook folder and click OK.
• Select your book again and right click to Open Book Folder - Open Book Data Folder.
  
  In the data folder where Calibre has previously copied all your book audio files, select all files and open them with your media player to create a m3u playlist which you may save in a temporary folder.
  
  
• Back to Calibre, Edit metadata individually then Add new format for this book and select the m3u playlist you've just created with your media player and click OK.
  
  You will now be able to play your audiobook by clicking on this format in the book details as you do for ebooks.

NOTE: Same as for ebooks, you may delete original audio files and playlist as Calibre has copied them all in its library.

A New Easier Way to Catalog Your Printed Books in Calibre

• Six months ago, I explained how to add printed books to Calibre by creating as many dummy TXT files, which was quite a tedious task. Now there's a much easier and quicker way to do that as we saw while adding audiobooks since all you need to do is Add books - Add Empty Book then edit metadata as previoulsy explained.
• If you've used my old method, you may delete the dummy text files using unneccessary space on your hard disk by selecting your books and Delete specific format files for selected books.
  
  Thereupon a list of format will be displayed according to what's available in your selection of books. Just tick TXT then OK and you're done.

NOTE: If you have books both in paper or digital format, no need to create several entries for the same books. Instead create customized columns for printed book formats which you may then fill in manually where applicable. I have also added a field for audiobook length.

Hoping this tutorial will be of any use to you.

© La Pensine Mutine. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.

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How to Add Physical Media to a Digital Book or Video Library

How frustrating to have built up an extensive collection of books and DVD/Blu-rays (or VHS tapes!) and being unable to remember which items you have and where to find them because it takes so much space on your shelves that most often, you need to store them in double or even triple storing. Nearly a decade ago, I had explained how to catalogue your collections with Ant Movie Catalog but ever since it became quite obsolete as much easier and more effective (multiplatform) new software such as Calibre for books and Kodi for films are now available. However, these applications have been developed for digital media. So how do you add your physical media to manage all your collections in the same place?

Well, luckily I've found a way!

The following tutorials assume that you already know how to use Calibre and Kodi and that have created digital libraries for all your books and movies. If not, please, refer to relevant online tutorials.

How to add your printed books to Calibre

1. Configure Calibre's importation pattern

You need to do that as shown in the animated GIF below (sorry it's all in French, but you should recognise the steps as described right after).

• Click on Preferences (Ctrl+P).
• Import/export - Adding books section.
• Read metadata tab.
• In the Regular expression field, in the drop down menu, select the following pattern:
  (?P<title>.+) - (?P<author>[^_]+)
• Enter a file name (do not forget the file extension) to check it does work and that everything before the dash ends up in the Title field while everything that comes after ends up in the Authors field. Make sure to add a space on both sides of the dash.
• If your Test is okay, then Apply and Close.

2. Create dummy digital books

This second step assumes that you have already created a list of all your printed books according to the preset pattern above.

• Open your file manager and Create New Folder (which you may delete after use) in which you will add all your dummy digital books.
• Right click Create New Document - Blank Document (on Windows it may be New Text Document).
• Rename this text file according to the preset importation pattern and do not forget the TXT extension.

I recommend creating a generic Title - Author.txt file and duplicating it as many times as you need and rename it accordingly.

3. Add books to your library

When you're done, you'll have to import your dummy books in Calibre.

• Click Add books - Add books from a single folder (A) and select your temporary folder.
• Then proceed as you would do for digital books.
• When the importation is done, you may delete your temporary dummy book folder as Calibre has copied them in your library.

NOTE: I advise you to use Edit metadata individually so as to be able to choose the correct information and the book cover that suits you best. I also recommend adding new metadata sources (Preferences - Advanced - Extensions - Metadata Sources) such as Goodread and Babelio for instance. you may also note that I have created custom columns to indicate printed book formats (hardback/paperback). I intend to create another to keep track of where my printed books are stored on my shelves. Shouldn't take too long with the Edit metadata in bulk function.

How to add your DVD/Blu-rays to Kodi

1. Create dummy videos

Creating dummy videos is about similar to creating dummy books except that you cannot create blank video files from your file manager. I have therefore made one you may download (right click to Save):

Unlike with Calibre, the folder you're going to create to add your dummy movie files will not be temporary. So you'll need to create it directly in your video library. The next steps are the same as for books but renaming will only use Title and optionally date (see relevant online tutorials for Kodi).

2. Add a new video source to Kodi

You may now tell Kodi where to look for your dummy video folder just like you did for your other sources. Select Movies as a category for scrapers.

Then right click on this new source to Scan for new content.

3. Specific cases

Some of your videos may not be found by metadata scrapers. Either because such data for your movie doesn't exist or because it is regarded as a mini series.

In the former case, you'll need to create a NFO text file named exactly as your movie file and add your own artwork in the same folder (see online Kodi help documentation to find out how to do that).

In the latter case, you'll need to create another folder as a new source for Kodi and use TV Series as category to use the appropriate scraper. Then move all the relevant dummy video files to that folder.

If you have series on discs, proceed the same way using a folder per season and a dummy.mp4 per season folder. Name our dummy file same as the series title adding S for season plus the season number followed by E for episode followed by the episode number dash another episode and episode number and so on. Kodi will fetch the thumbnails and information for each episode you indicate in the filename even if you only have one dummy file.

Series (Year) S01E01-E02-E03.mp4

NOTE: In the above example, I only had a couple of episodes per season so I looked up the correct number on TMBD and named my dummy files accordingly and Kodi does display the right episodes and not those I do not have on my DVD.

My only regret is not being able to add a custom field to indicate where my DVD's are store on my shelves unlike with Calibre.

© La Pensine Mutine. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.

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Manage Your Multimedia Content With Kodi

Eight years after my very first OK Computer article about Ant Movie Catalog — only available for Windows and which I stopped using after shifting to Linux a couple years ago (despite the fact that it works well with Wine) — let's bring back the long forgotten category to introduce you to an excting application called Kodi.

What Is Kodi?

Created in 2003 and formerly known as Xbox Media Center (XBMC), Kodi was initially developed as a free open-source media player for the first generation of XBox consoles prior to become a multi-platform media centre which can run on BSD, Raspbian, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Android and iOS. As from 2014, it changed its name to Kodi.

Supporting about any existing media format, Kodi is a stylish and powerful multi-tool application to build and organise your digital media library (music, videos, photos) and share it with other computers or multimedia devices via uPnP. At present, I've only tested with local files but it can also play CDs, DVDs, BluRays, display weather forecast (not really essential for a media centre), create slideshows with your pictures (don't use that either) and with the use of third party addons, you can listen to web radios and streaming music, watch and record TV provided your device comes with a proper DVB tuner card (and you have a TV license to remain legal).

I have tested online replays for French TV with Catch-up TV & More addon and it's a much smoother experience than watching on the dedicated channel website since you don't get all the annoying commercials which often freeze the player and are a considerable waste of time (while also hurting your eardrums as they raise the volume which is supposed to be illegal). In addition, you can resume a TV program or movie where you interrupted it even after leaving Kodi since the time code is remembered (provided the movie is still available online of course). You can also improve the audio and video quality while such options are never offered on TV channel websites.

Kodi also provides web interfaces to connect to various services as well a game console emulator to play your favourite games directly from Kodi (haven't tested that either).

Last but not least, you can use different skins than the default one. I for one have tested  Aeon Nox Silvo, all really beautiful and fully customisable, but which doesn't seem designed for small 5:4 computer screens.

Download And Install Kodi

Download and install Kodi for your operating system HERE

Linux users will find it in the official repositories for Ubuntu  and Linux Mint (Leia 18). In order to use the latest version (Matrix 19), I recommend installing the Flatpak version instead (also in the repositories for Ubuntu-based distributions).

Before importing your multimedia contents, you'll want to organise your folders first and properly rename your files for optimum return from scrapers (unless you decide to use local information) which could be the topic of an upcoming tutorial depending of your feedback.

© La Pensine Mutine. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.

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