The community metadata site

AudioSilo Meta at meta.audiosilo.app is an open, community-built database of audiobooks: the books themselves, each narration (recording), the narrators and authors behind them, and the series they belong to. It is the catalogue that powers the About this book extras in the player - and it is free for anyone to browse, with no account and no sign-up.

The database treats the details other catalogues skip as first-class information: every recording lists its narrators, and one book can hold many recordings (for example a Stephen Fry reading and a Jim Dale reading), each with its own runtime, publisher, chapters and store identifiers.

Browsing the database

The home page has a single search box. It searches books, people (authors and narrators), and series at once, and if you paste an ASIN or ISBN it jumps straight to the exact recording. Below the search box you'll find the latest additions and a running count of what the community has catalogued so far.

• A book page lists every catalogued narration of that title. Each recording card shows its narrators, runtime, release date, publisher, any region-specific ASINs and ISBNs (tap one to copy it), and an expandable chapter list. If the book belongs to a series, the page links to the series and offers previous and next buttons plus a "more in this series" row of covers.
• A series page lists the member books in reading order, with their positions (including half-numbers like 2.5).
• A person page collects everything a narrator or author is credited on.

Characters and story-so-far recaps

On a book page, two extra tabs appear once the community has written them - the same material the player shows under About this book:

• Characters - a card for each person in the book, written by readers in their own words. A card's name, role and aliases are always visible, along with the chapter where the character first appears; the description stays hidden behind the card until you open it, so you choose when to read on.
• Story so far - short "what's happened up to here" recaps, each labelled with the chapter it is safe to read after. Every recap stays closed until you open it, so you can catch up to exactly where you've listened without spoiling what's ahead. Some books also carry a whole-book summary and an ending recap for readers who have finished; those are marked as full spoilers.

Check your own library

The import page tells you which of your audiobooks are already in the database and which are new. Drop in a library export and it sorts your books into "In the database", "New - you can contribute these", and "Cannot auto-match".

It accepts an export from OpenAudible, Libation, or Audiobookshelf, or a scan of a plain folder of audiobooks. The page explains how to produce each one.

Your file is read entirely in your browser and never uploaded. Only the book identifiers (ASINs and ISBNs) are sent to the database to look for a match, plus the author names of books that didn't match, so it can tell a brand-new book from a new narration of a book that's already listed. Personal fields - purchase history, ratings, file paths - never leave your device.

Contributing

Everything in AudioSilo Meta is added by its users, and you don't have to be a programmer to help. Contributions are made through guided forms that open a prefilled entry on the project's GitHub page; a bot then checks the submission and files it. You need a free GitHub account to submit one.

There are forms to add a book or a narration, to write a book's characters or its story-so-far recaps, to send in a correction, and to submit a whole library at once. The import page above turns each new book it finds into a one-click "add this book" link.

The contribute page shows where help is most needed: which books still need characters or recaps, and which series are missing volumes. From there, a guided builder walks you through writing the characters and recaps for a book you know well, checking the spoiler positions and length limits as you go, and hands you a finished submission at the end.

How the data stays honest

Two rules keep the catalogue clean, and they're worth knowing before you contribute:

• Facts only, in your own words. The catalogue records verifiable facts and community-written descriptions. It never copies a publisher's blurb or text from another site, and it stores cover art as a link rather than a copy.
• Two open licences. The factual catalogue - books, recordings, narrators, series - is dedicated to the public domain (CC0), free to use in any app for any purpose. The community-written characters and recaps are shared under CC BY-SA (credit the source and share your own additions on the same terms).

Works with Audiobookshelf

If you use Audiobookshelf, AudioSilo Meta can act as a custom metadata provider for it, so your Audiobookshelf library can pull narrators, recordings, series order and cover art from the community database. The Audiobookshelf page has the setup steps, and also shows how to send your Audiobookshelf library back to help fill in the catalogue.