[Enhancement]: Per Chapter Playlist functionality for Audiobooks (similar to Podcast playlists)

[manalive]

Describe the feature/enhancement

Basically, the current Playlist feature for Audiobooks seems to be a "reading list" so users can see what complete books they want to listen to in a certain order.

I have several use cases for wanting to add individual chapters (or failing that, tracks) to a playlist. My MAIN use case is that we use audiobooks heavily in home education so I need to be grabbing chapters from various subject books and scheduling them out to be read in order. Example:

Playlist Year 1 Week 1

• History & Tales: Sword of Damocles
• Our Island Story: Chapter 1: Albion & Brutus
• Paddle-to-the-Sea: Chapter 1
• Aesop: Wolf & Kid
• Aesop: Tortoise & Duck
• Parables of Nature: Unknown Land
• Just So Stories: Whale
• Blue Fairy Book: Beauty and the Beast
• Tales from Shakespeare: Chapter 3: A Midsummer Night's Dream etc..

Here are other use cases for this functionality:

• Creating alternative reading orders (chronological or character perspective or publication order). You can imagine how much the Warhammer guys would love this, for example.
• Listening to only a subset of a large book or collection. (Sure, you could skip around in the player,, but it's clunky if you are jumping back and forth between different books you are listening to.
• Creating an author/subject bibliography that includes contributions to anthologies
• Practice and review playlists for language learning or professional/academic education
• Just any time you want a list of audio samplings to repeat or reference for any reason

My suggestion would be to rename the current feature to "Reading Lists" and implement Playlists as described, but even if the naming is different, I would imagine that a lot of users would find uses for this functionality.

[nichwall]

This would be cool, but probably depends on something like https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf/issues/785 being completed first due to differences in the data model between books and podcasts. There is not really a way to reference individual chapters/tracks within a book from another item yet, and just references the library item itself.

[advplyr]

I can see your use-case for it. I don't see how this could be done for chapters unless Abs clips the chapters and stores them somewhere or an on-the-fly transcode. It is possible for individual audio tracks but would require a new data model and a large UI/UX effort.

[j3nesis87]

Just to show support for this suggestion - I have a lot of large audiobooks of short stories (e.g. Sherlock Holmes short stories). Most of them are 1 chapter = 1 story (and a few multi-part ones), as seperate audio files. I'd love to be able to save my 'favourites' into a playlist, so I'm not skipping through and/or wasting device space on the stories I don't listen to.