Plex's artist row for 272 chapters is a chapter number the ripper put in the
artist tag (0.4, 31, 05), which would have filed them under a shelf called 0.4.
A narrator is a person, so it must contain a letter; the same test is deliberately
not applied to a book title, which may honestly be 1984.
The first real plan filed 1,106 chapters from 14 unrelated top-level folders
onto one shelf, because all 1,106 carry the album tag [Unknown Album] and the
same artist tag. Plex's album title is the authority for the shelf only when it
names a book; a placeholder names nothing, and unrelated books share it. Those
chapters now park with the path they have today, timestamp-glued variants
included; Various Artists stays a legitimate multi-cast narrator.
The linter caps a page at 500 lines and a description at 120 chars: the section
lost four lines of prose (no law went with them) and the description lost its
restatement of the format names. gen-vault-index.py regenerated the locator row.
One page owns the relayout facts: the new section carries the Plex-only reader,
the shape, the four commands, and the two laws a future operator would otherwise
re-litigate (never renumber a chapter; the shelf is the narrator). The music
section said its plan was NOT applied — it was applied on 2026-10-31, and a stale
line in a runbook gets believed, so it now names the journal and the rollback.
The audiobook tree is the one library Jellyfin does not read at all and Plex
reads completely: 58,975 chapters matched into Artist/Album/Track, where the
album is the BOOK and the book's single artist row is the NARRATOR. That is the
authority the new planner files by, never the collection folder a pack made.
Audiobooks/<Narrator>/<Book> (<year>)/<the file's own name>
Two laws are the opposite of the music tool's, both forced by the rows: files
are never renumbered (72% of the books carry chapters with no usable index, and
playback order comes from the embedded track tag either way, so an invented
number can only lie), and the shelf is the narrator, not the author (every book
has exactly one artist row; the author survives in 10% of album titles and in no
column Plex stores, so one rule beats a shelf half authors and half narrators).
media-census.py gains the audiobooks export: the chapters Plex matched under a
root, host paths straight through, nothing outside the root and nothing Plex
deleted. 22 tests in tests/media_audiobooks.bats pin the export's join and the
plan's output.
dank