---
type: reference
title: Media Audiobook Relayout
description: "Re-filing /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks by Plex's chapter rows: narrator shelves, no renumbering, the refusals."
tags: [dankserver, media-server, plex, media-relayout]
timestamp: 2026-10-31T00:00:00Z
---

# Media Audiobook Relayout

`/mnt/entropy/Audiobooks` is the one library here that [[Jellyfin]] does not read
at all — its music scanner has no audiobook concept — while [[Plex]] indexes all
of it as Artist → Album → Track: the album is the BOOK, that book's single artist
is the NARRATOR, both matched out of the files' own tags. Today one book is split
across `… [Part 1]`, `… [Part 2]` folders three or four deep inside a collection
pack, so a scan serves three quarters of a novel; `scripts/media-audiobooks.py`
re-files the tree so the property both servers' book scanners assume is true —

    Audiobooks/<Narrator>/<Book> (<year>)/<the file keeps its own name>

The shared gates, the executor, the journal law and the rollback live in
[[Media Relayout]]; this page is the audiobook arm only.

```bash
# 1. The authority: Plex's chapter rows for this root (the DB opens read-only).
python3 scripts/media-census.py audiobooks --root /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks \
    --out /tmp/ab_rows.tsv
# 2. What is on disk (stat only).
python3 scripts/media-census.py enumerate --root /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks \
    --out /tmp/ab_enum.tsv
# 3. The plan.
python3 scripts/media-audiobooks.py --root /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks \
    --enum /tmp/ab_enum.tsv --rows /tmp/ab_rows.tsv --out /tmp/ab_plan.tsv \
    --exceptions /tmp/ab_exceptions.txt
# 4. Read the exceptions file FIRST. Then the same executor, journal and rollback
#    as [[Media Relayout]] shows, on its own journal, and refresh the Plex section
#    as in step 5 of the movie Procedure — from inside the container, never over
#    the host port.
scripts/media-apply.py apply --plan /tmp/ab_plan.tsv --root /mnt/entropy \
    --journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout-audiobooks.jsonl --apply
```

The group is the identity Plex asserts in its own database — **(narrator, book,
year)** — so one book arriving in four part folders becomes one folder, and a
1965 and a 2020 recording that share a title stay two books.

Two laws are forced by what the rows actually hold:

+- **A chapter is never renumbered.** Most books contain chapters whose index Plex
  does not know, so a number written into a name would be invented — and it would
  buy nothing, because both servers order playback by the embedded track tag, not
  by the file name. A wrong number in a name is the number a human later trusts.
  Fix order in the tags: a Plex scan re-reads tags and never renames a file.
+- **The shelf is the narrator, not the author.** Every book has exactly one artist
  row and it is the narrator; the author survives only inside some album titles
  (`Kryptos by Graham McNeill`) and in no column Plex stores, so deriving it would
  mean parsing titles where a ripper wrote one and inventing it everywhere else.
  The author stays visible in the folder name Plex itself shows.

What it refuses, the music arm's list with one addition: a video container, audio
no chapter row names, and a loose file in a folder holding two books all park under
`_unsorted` with the path they have today — and so does a chapter whose row names
**no book or no narrator**: a placeholder (`[Unknown Album]`, `[Unknown Artist]`)
that unrelated books share, or a chapter number mistagged as the artist (`0.4`).
`Various Artists` is not a placeholder — that is a multi-cast read.

The reviewed plan lives at `/mnt/entropy/media-relayout-audiobooks-plan.tsv`; it
applies on its own journal, behind the music writer, and then refreshes the Plex
section. Verify it with `--db-kind plex` — Jellyfin holds no rows here, so a
Jellyfin pass proves nothing either way.

## See Also

[[Media Relayout]], [[Media Music Relayout]], [[Plex]]