The metadata
The details, filled in by listeners.
AudioSilo Meta is a free, open audiobook database at meta.audiosilo.app. Your server uses it to match messy tags, put a series in order and show its gaps, and, for a growing number of books, spoiler-safe characters and recaps.
As of October 2026
Narrators, recordings and chapters come first.
A work is the book; a recording is one reading of it, with its narrators, runtime, publisher, chapters and the ASINs and ISBNs for each region. People and series sit alongside, series with half-numbered entries and more than one reading order.
282,383
works
297,244
recordings
124,083
narrators and authors
45,586
series
9,094,856
chapters
19
languages
For your library
From a folder called “Book 3” to the right book.
In the admin console, Match compares your tags and folder names with the database and lets you take one field at a time, the cover included. Match automatically does a whole library in the background and sorts the confident matches from the ones to check.
- Series in the right order, with the books you are missing shown as gaps
- Publication, chronological or recommended reading orders
- An About block on each book, with a link to its full entry
- Your own edits are never replaced, and every community value can be reverted
The community layer
Characters and recaps that wait for you.
Listeners write character sheets and chapter-by-chapter recaps in their own words. Each recap is tagged with the chapter it is safe after, each character with the chapter they first appear in, so the player only shows what you have reached.
This layer is young: 3,148 works have characters and recaps so far, out of 282,383. Every one added lights up Who's who, Story so far and Previously on for everyone listening to that book.
Open data
The repository is the database.
Every work, recording, person and series is a JSON file on GitHub, changed by pull request, checked by tooling in CI and compiled into one SQLite file for each release. Anyone can take the whole thing.
CC0
The core data: works, recordings, people and series. Public domain, no conditions.
CC BY-SA 4.0
The community layer: characters, recaps and descriptions, written by listeners and credited.
AGPLv3
The tooling that validates, builds and serves it. It also works as an Audiobookshelf metadata provider.
No publisher blurbs and no cover art are taken in; descriptions are written by the community and covers are links. The repository
Contribute
Add the book you know best.
The contribute page lists the books that still need characters and recaps, with a guided builder. Submissions arrive as an issue form or a pull request; automated checks validate them and look for duplicates before they are merged.
- The sidecars tool (open source, AGPLv3): point it at an audiobook folder and it transcribes on your machine, then drafts and checks character sheets and recaps with your own Claude or ChatGPT account. Needs that account and a computer that can run speech recognition.
- Missing books in known series are filled in automatically.
- Watch a series on the site and get new entries in a feed, or by message from the AudioSilo Discord bot.
Privacy
Your server asks. Your player doesn't.
Players never talk to meta.audiosilo.app; your server does. To look a book up it sends the book's ASIN or ISBN, never a file path or who is listening. Answers are cached, so they survive a restart or an outage.
Match sends a little more (title, author, series, length and up to three folder names), and only when an admin opens Match or runs it on the library.
One switch turns it off. Turn community metadata off in the server settings and every outbound lookup stops; players hide the features that need it.
See it on a real library.
Every one of the demo's 29 public-domain classics is matched to the database. Open a series for its ghost spines, or a book's Characters and Recaps, which only show what you've heard. Then browse the rest of the database.
No sign-up, nothing to install. It opens the real web player in a new tab.
Characters and recaps cover 25 of the 29. Rupert of Hentzau, The Call of the Wild, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Art of War are still waiting for someone to write theirs on meta.audiosilo.app.