Wow, and those aren't unlistenable due to compression? Cool. Yeah I would have thought it was more like 1gb per 10 hours, but I guess it's orders of magnitude less than that.
For real. I become a little bit of a snob when it comes to my audiobooks. I have a collection going of near 2000 and thats about 2TB of space. Now, I do try and get the "best" I can of what's available, and, to be fair, 64kbps books are truly well and good. There are also ones that sound great and don't pack a high bitrate, but once it hits the 32kbps that when its rare I'll touch them unless the are the only copies I can find. Personally, I hate how much highly compressed books make the narrators sound. Just awful
That seems normal. The copy I have in an m4b ~530 MB (@63kbps). There are various tools like the one you mentioned and (https://github.com/VarSell/iAmDeaf) which I'm sure does the same thing. Unfortunately I am not too well versed in the actual ripping of content so i dont really know how people get the untouched "highest" bitrate content. But what you did appears to be wihtin the normal range, I would say.
I am not really part of the scene but am part of a community that shares the booty
Setting up a plex server takes less than 5 minutes and audiobooks are less than 100mb most of the time. So not really. Setting up audiobookshelf takes a bit more time if you don't already have docker installed/setup on windows but even then. An hour maybe? At most?
Cool! Could you direct me to this five minute guide to setting up a Plex server? Also for these you'd need another computer that's always on, right? If it's off, you wouldn't be able to access the server? Our family only uses laptops right now so that would be an issue.
I can write the 5 minute guide out for you in this comment. Im assuming windows. And yeah the machine has to be on. Although you could just run it off your main machine, especially if its just audiobooks.
Make a plex account
Download and run the latest version of PMS (plex media server) and follow the gui to create your media folders
Now if you only want to access the media within your home, you're done. Grab the apps for each device and be on your way. If you want to access out of your home theres one more step. Port forwarding. Thats done within your router and is different for each one but basically boils down to this.
Find setting.
Create port forward entry for whichever ip is hosting plex.
Port forward 32400 on tcp/udp
Done.
Im explaining it in short bullet point lines because it should be that easy.
Yes. You need a PC that can act as a server (so run 24/7). If you want outside access you would also need a VPN or expose your services to the internet.