I’ve had one of these running for years, honestly I didn’t expect it to last this long as it looks really cheap

If whatever you’re doing works with av1 then I’d say go for it. I do AV1 for Plex since all of my devices can hardware decode, however I keep my own videos at h264 software encoded (for smaller filesizes) since Synology photos doesn’t support AV1.

I use tdarr for my large scale conversions to AV1 but I use shutterencoder for everything else. It’s like handbrake but friendly for working in large batches and the UI is really nice https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/ It will add H265 to the end of the name too

Today I learned yt-dlp has sponsorblock built in

I use plexamp too with a large library so I can comment on the android side (I didn’t know some of these differences existed)

• the app has settings for audio quality dependent on connection type, including not converting hires audio
• as far as I can tell the EQ in plexamp is global across devices, though it has presets for specific devices -same on Android I don’t think you can manually listen to downloaded songs outside of the app

I’ll also comment that I sort all my music by folder and Plex does ok with this Not great, but it works

Someone gets an eraser out and goes at it

I’ve actually found myself surprised at how my brain doesn’t hear that was weird. I personally find it very natural. Maybe it’s because I was read a lot of stories verbally as a kid?

Elevenlabs is incredible but yeah it’s not there 100% for audiobook purposes I think. I trained it on an audiobook from one of my favorite narrators and had it read from another book. It sounded just like the guy but the intonations and mannerisms just weren’t quite there to match the text.

It’s weird. When there’s just one narrator and they do different voices for different characters I don’t think twice about it but I can still tell the characters apart by voice alone. But when there’s an entirely different person’s voice my attention gets mildly distracted by it. It’s similar to when sometimes books will have a random sentence read out by someone different than the narrator, probably a post recording correction.

That being said it’s usually pretty few and far between when I come across an audiobook book with multiple narrators, and usually it’s per section of the book (maybe from the perspective of different characters) rather than switching mid dialogue between characters