sorting and missing items issues

[AncientMystic]

okay, so i am not sure if i am doing something wrong here or if there is a trick to it or something, audiobookshelf finds roughly 27% or less of my library, even books in the same folders are either missing or paired together as one book and its chapters and beyond the missing items, getting it to sort books in a useful way is problematic.

if i set directories by letter > author > book
it then sorts everything by author names as the "books" with the books themselves being seen as the chapters

if i set everything by author > book
it then sorts everything as books and their chapters, which is more preferable

but either way everything is a disordered mess and it wont pair series together or authors together and its really hard to actually find anything unless i am looking for a specific book and know which book comes next in the series, anything more than a couple books in one library section and it starts getting out of hand, i practically have to make a new library section for each individual author/series.... either way it is kind of a nightmare, so i feel like perhaps there is another way to do this? or maybe the sorting could be improved somehow?

i have tried using jellyfin since i have it running aswell and while it does better by keeping folder structure and sorting by authors > books > files, it fails to properly sort by release date, etc and doesn't show release dates in the UI, so it doesn't exactly work right to figure out which book is which in a series.

thank you to the devs for all your hard work on this, overall it is a really great project and i am loving it so far, just having issues with sorting the files on it haha

so how does everyone else sort their files in audiobookshelf?

[nichwall]

Every book must be in its own folder, even if it's a single file book. This sounds like an issue with how your library is organized.

Edit to add: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/docs#book-directory-structure
https://www.audiobookshelf.org/docs#book-audio-metadata

[AncientMystic]

i see, thank you. only a few of my folders are setup this way, i suppose i have a lot of work to do.

[AncientMystic]

i have been looking over my library and one folder i have setup in exactly this way, is one of the folders it is ignoring all the books that are sorted in this way.

[nichwall]

Do you have any media files that are not in their own folder? For example, a loose audio or ebook file in the author folder. Or, did one of those file exist when you scanned? Once the files are grouped as the same library item, you will want to delete the item and rescan with the correct directory structure to make sure the files are not grouped in the database.

[AncientMystic]

Do you have any media files that are not in their own folder? For example, a loose audio or ebook file in the author folder. Or, did one of those file exist when you scanned? Once the files are grouped as the same library item, you will want to delete the item and rescan with the correct directory structure to make sure the files are not grouped in the database.

that was why i think, although after i sorted them, removed it, rescanned, etc, it then tried to say it was now 44 copies of the same book that wasn't even in the folder at all, i ended up having to manually fix each item and set covers, but at least that is one author fixed and sorted.