When “Import Folder” Becomes a Full-Time Job

Importing one audiobook is easy enough. Choose the folder, check the files, fix the title, and move on.

Then you point the same workflow at a library drive containing fifty books. Some have one folder per book. Others are split into Disc 1 and Disc 2. A few have useful album tags, a few rely entirely on folder names, and at least one has cover art called front-final-actually-final.jpg.

The conversion itself is no longer the annoying part. Repeating the setup fifty times is.

That is the problem I built Smart Auto-Import to solve. You give ChapterForge a library root, it looks through the folders, groups the audio into likely books, and gives you a review screen. You choose which results should become ChapterForge projects and whether those projects should also go to the batch queue.

What It Actually Automates

The original version of this article gave Smart Auto-Import too much credit. It described silence detection, confidence scores, automatic chapter splitting, and source-file renaming. Those are not part of this workflow.

Smart Auto-Import does something simpler and, for a large library, more useful:

1. Walks the library tree and collects supported audio files from its subfolders.
2. Identifies likely audiobooks using folder structure and available album metadata.
3. Combines common multipart layouts such as Disc 1, Disc 2, or folders sharing the same album tag.
4. Shows the detected books for review with their titles, authors, file counts, folder locations, and available artwork.
5. Creates only the projects you select, with an option to send them to the batch queue.

It does not rename or move the source files. ChapterForge builds its own project records that point back to those files, so you can organize the audiobook without reorganizing the drive first.

Step 1: Choose the Library Root

Start with the folder that contains the collection you want to scan. It might be a carefully organized audiobook directory, a staging folder for new downloads, or a drive that has accumulated years of mixed naming conventions.

ChapterForge searches recursively beneath that root. On Windows, the Smart Auto-Import scanner currently recognizes MP3, M4A, WAV, AAC, and FLAC source files. Folders it cannot access are skipped rather than stopping the whole scan.

The Windows app also warns when the selected root is on a network drive, because reading many folders and metadata records over a network can take noticeably longer than scanning a local disk.

This is not an “any file is fair game” system. The app intentionally filters for supported audio extensions, and the scan result is only as good as the files and folder permissions it can read.

Step 2: Turn Folders into Likely Books

Finding audio files is straightforward. Deciding which files belong to the same audiobook is the interesting part.

ChapterForge uses two main sources of evidence:

• Folder structure. A folder containing audio is a natural candidate for one audiobook project.
• Embedded album metadata. When available, album and artist tags help give the candidate a useful title and author and can identify folders that belong together.

If a folder name follows a pattern such as Author - Book Title, ChapterForge can also use those parts when the embedded tags are empty.

Multipart and multi-disc layouts

Some libraries look like this:

The Long Book/
  Disc 1/
  Disc 2/
  Disc 3/

Creating three projects would simply move the mess into ChapterForge. The scanner therefore looks for common multipart folder names such as disc, disk, CD, part, volume, chapter, section, or book followed by a number. When sibling folders consistently look like parts—or share the same non-empty album tag—it can roll them into one audiobook candidate under the parent folder.

This is a useful heuristic, not mind-reading. A folder named Part 1 probably belongs with Part 2; a collection with missing or incorrect album tags may still need adjustment after import.

Optional album deduplication

On Windows, the review workflow includes a Deduplicate albums by ID3 tag option. With it enabled, the current scanner treats later folders with an already-seen album value as duplicates and keeps the first detected result. Turn it off when repeated album names genuinely represent separate books or editions—or when files spread across unrelated folders all need to be included.

That choice exists because metadata is evidence, not proof. Two unrelated files can have the same generic album tag, and one book can have inconsistent tags across its parts.

Step 3: Review Before Creating Anything

After the scan, ChapterForge does not silently create a project for every guess. It shows a list of detected albums first.

On Windows, all results begin selected, but you can select or deselect individual books, select everything, or clear the selection. You can also sort the results by title, author, genre, year, or folder name before deciding what to keep.

The preview includes practical signals:

• the detected book title and author
• its source folder
• the number of audio files found
• genre and year when metadata supplies them
• a folder-based cover image when one is available

This is where Smart Auto-Import earns the “smart” part of its name: not because it pretends every guess is correct, but because it does enough organization to make review faster.

Step 4: Build the Projects You Approved

Once you confirm the selection, ChapterForge creates one project per chosen audiobook.

During Windows project creation, the app reads more detail from the source files than it needed during the initial grouping pass. It can populate duration, track number, bitrate, sample rate, narrator, publisher, language, author-sort, and comment fields when those values exist.

Chapter order follows a practical series of fallbacks:

1. embedded track numbers, when available
2. leading numbers in filenames such as 01, 02, and 03
3. natural filename order

Chapter titles initially come from the source filenames without their extensions. The files themselves are not renamed. If those names need cleanup, open the created project and use ChapterForge's chapter editor, auto-numbering, or bulk-edit tools before conversion.

Cover art selection

The Windows scanner first looks for common image names such as cover, folder, album, front, or artwork. If it cannot find a suitable image beside the audio, project creation can fall back to embedded artwork from the first source file.

This is much more precise than promising that every project will emerge with perfect artwork. ChapterForge looks in sensible places and leaves the result reviewable.

Step 5: Create Now or Continue into the Queue

Smart Auto-Import can stop after creating the projects, which is useful when you want to inspect each book carefully. Or it can add the new projects to the batch queue so the next stage of the workflow is already prepared.

The scan and creation screens show live progress, and the Windows scanner runs its heavier directory and metadata work on a worker thread so the main interface is not tied up by the library walk. You can also cancel a scan that is taking longer than expected.

Queueing is still not the same as trusting the scanner blindly. For a new or inconsistent library, I recommend creating the projects first, opening a few representative results, and checking chapter order, metadata, and artwork before starting a large conversion batch.

What Smart Auto-Import Does Not Do

Clear boundaries make this feature easier to trust:

• It does not detect chapter boundaries from silence. Each imported source file becomes a chapter in the created project.
• It does not assign confidence scores. The detected-album review screen is the quality-control step.
• It does not rename, move, or rewrite your source files. Cleanup happens inside the ChapterForge project.
• It does not merge or split audio during the scan. Conversion happens later, after project review or through the queue.
• It does not guarantee perfect grouping. Folder layout and metadata can be incomplete or wrong.
• It does not replace a final check. A five-minute review is preferable to discovering a bad order after a long batch has finished.

These limitations are intentional. Smart Auto-Import handles the repetitive first pass and leaves editorial decisions visible.

A Realistic Library Workflow

Imagine a drive with twenty audiobook folders. Most are ordinary single-folder books. Three use Disc 1 and Disc 2 subfolders. Two are missing album tags. One old compilation shares a generic album name with another folder.

A sensible workflow is:

1. Choose the library root and run the scan.
2. Review the detected albums and file counts.
3. Turn off deduplication if a legitimate repeated album name was collapsed.
4. Deselect anything that should not become an audiobook project.
5. Create the selected projects without queueing the first time.
6. Open a few edge cases and check their chapter order, metadata, and artwork.
7. Add the approved projects to the queue when the structure looks right.

Smart Auto-Import does not make the library perfect in one click. It turns twenty repetitive setup jobs into one scan, one review, and a much shorter cleanup pass.

ChapterForge Is Available on Mac and Windows

Smart Auto-Import is available in the current ChapterForge apps on both platforms. The core idea is the same: scan a larger collection, group likely books, review the results, and create several projects in one pass.

ChapterForge for macOS

The Mac version provides a native Smart Auto-Import workflow with live scan progress, multipart grouping, artwork discovery, project review, batch queueing, and watch-folder automation. Smart Auto-Import is part of ChapterForge Pro.

Download ChapterForge on the Mac App Store →

ChapterForge for Windows

The Windows version includes a dedicated Smart Auto-Import review page, recursive scanning, optional album-tag deduplication, selectable results, sorting controls, bulk project creation, and optional queue handoff.

Get ChapterForge from the Microsoft Store →

You can also compare the Mac and Windows versions on the ChapterForge product page.

The feature is most useful when your problem is not one difficult audiobook, but the repetition of preparing many ordinary ones. ChapterForge handles the inventory work and keeps the decisions where they belong: with you.

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I built Smart Auto-Import after realizing that “Import Folder” felt simple only because I was testing it one book at a time. Real libraries are messier, larger, and full of exceptions. The feature works best when it saves the boring clicks without pretending those exceptions do not exist.