[Bug]: Increment pub date by minutes instead of seconds for audiobook tracks

[TOZigs]

What happened?

I'm trying to add my audiobooks to an rss feed to add to my podcatcher.
I'm doing this by making an rss feed to a collection.
But it seems like the publication date of my "episodes" (read chapters) change based on the book I first added to my library.

What happens is that all my books are mixed up with the earliest chapters coming in like: book 1 chapter 1, book 2 chapter 1, book 3 chapter 1, book 1 chapter 2 etc

What did you expect to happen?

I expected that my episodes would be sorted by book in the right order of chapters.

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Add one book to a collection
2. Pull the data from the rss feed

The result is as seen in the following screenshots:

Audiobookshelf version

2.13.4

How are you running audiobookshelf?

Docker

What OS is your Audiobookshelf server hosted from?

Windows

If the issue is being seen in the UI, what browsers are you seeing the problem on?

None

Logs

No response

Additional Notes

No response

[advplyr]

I'm not able to reproduce the issue but I'm not sure I understand. The pub date is somewhat arbitrary for audiobooks because all that matters is that it is in the correct order.
The order will be the order the books are in your collection. Then each books chapters/episodes will be ordered based on the tracks of that book.
If you have episodes that are out of order then make sure that the tracks on the book are in the correct order. You can manage the track order with the "Manage Tracks" button

[hobesman]

This just happened to me, using Pocket Casts. With multiple books in a collection shared via RSS, it seems like maybe Pocket Casts is ignoring the publication "seconds" and only reading the "day" and therefore acting like they're all published the same time. It then falls back to sorting alphabetically for episodes published "simultaneously."

This screenshot is with the Pocket Casts app set to sort episodes oldest to newest.

[advplyr]

When you open the RSS feed in the browser you can see that the episodes are in order there?

[hobesman]

When you open the RSS feed in the browser you can see that the episodes are in order there?

Yes, confirmed. The books are each 4 tracks, and in the browser the RSS URL shows shows track 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2...

[advplyr]

Since I don't have pocket casts one thing you can do that would be helpful to test is to add a podcast in a podcast library and edit the pub dates manually before opening an RSS feed.

If it is the case that we need to space out the pub dates for audiobook tracks you should be able to find out how much we need to do

[hobesman]

So create a collection, share it via RSS, add that RSS to a podcast library, modify the episode dates, and then reshare that podcast via a second RSS feed? I can do that as a test but I just wanted to make sure I'm understanding the request.

[hobesman]

Ok I just tried, but the audiobookshelf import has the same problem.

It looks like ABS also ignores seconds. I can only go as precise as minutes of publication, so they all get listed as simultaneous because they're all the same minute for published date.

[hobesman]

Ok I reshared that new podcast from ABS and added to Pocket Casts, and that app honored the episodes being published different minutes, but ignored differences in seconds for publishing date.

[advplyr]

I don't think we're on the same page.

From my understanding of your original issue the way that Abs is setting the pub date for audiobooks (by incrementing each tracks pub date by 1 second) is not working in Pocket Casts.

Your guess is that the reason it isn't working is because the 1 second increment is not large enough for Pocket Casts because Pocket Casts may be truncating by day. My guess would be that is unlikely but they may be truncating by minute or hour.

My suggestion as a way to test if this is to add a new podcast just for testing. You can use the "Add" button and search itunes to add a random podcast is probably the easiest way. I'll outline this step by step

1. Add a new podcast with some episodes
2. Navigate to the podcast page and edit the Pub Date field for each episode (my screenshot above).
   • The pub dates you can space out by minutes, hours, or day for testing to see which one is detected.
3. Open an RSS feed for this podcast (screenshot below)
4. Put the Abs RSS feed URL into Pocket Casts

[hobesman]

Yes that's essentially what I tested. I imported the podcast I'd shared. I changed some episodes by minutes, some by days, and left some unchanged (ABS doesn't let me see or change publication seconds). I then shared that podcast and added to Pocket Casts. The app honored the days and minutes differences and sorted accordingly, but ignored differences of seconds and lumped those all as simultaneous (i.e. reverted to alphabetical sorting).

So perhaps if ABS could increment by 60s instead of 1s?

[advplyr]

Yeah we can do that. I'm not sure that this issue is the same but I suppose we could use it