How is the Android app? The only good app for local audio-books I know is "Smart AudioBook Player". The web-app GUI in the demo is less than perfect, but kinda ok, if you enable chapter-view. The biggest problem is a single set of ±10 s rewind buttons: for a dedicated audio-book player it's not enough, a separate ±1 min button set is a must. But since the authors didn't think of that, I don't expect it to be different in the Android app. I'm rather asking about mobile-specific features:
1. Does it properly stop the playback when headphones are disconnected?
2. Is there a usable lock-screen widget?
3. Does it auto-rewind after a pause? It's best when the pause duration is taken into account: it shouldn't rewind more than a couple of seconds if you pause for a second, but a whole minute may be better if you left it off yesterday.
4. Does it handle well situations when the server is not accessible? Can you just pre-download a couple of audio-books for your 10 h long flight? I mean, honestly, streaming is never desirable, the only point of a self-hosted server is that you don't have to download and delete your collection manually. It's a tricky problem when the playlist is highly variable (as with music), but for an audio-book player should be a non issue: just pre-fetch a whole book (maybe manually), storage space is a lesser issue than mobile internet.
Do you have any other favorite features from Smart Audiobook Player? I'm building an audiobook app now. I have some unique features unrelated to playback, but I also want it to be an excellent player.
1) Yes, it stops playing when I put my bluetooth headphones away (YMMV with wired or other methods).
2) Yes, but sometimes pressing play wont actually play. I also see this occurring with antenna-pod (FOSS podcast player), so I think this is Android 15 being broken, or they both use the same underlying (non standard?) audio library.
3) The sibling says yes, from checking the github issues, I think its not as "smart" as other players and simply does a fixed offset if you pause for some length of time. Honestly I always figured it ran back a few seconds due to how keyframes [sic] work in m4b files.
4) Yes, I do not have any data on my phone so I basically exclusively download my books to the device and play them offline. Sometimes I do get progress syncing issues, honestly I forget in which direction, possibly it only occurs when I finish a book offline then go online and it resets back to the last "still playing" sync point.
Sometimes I do have issues downloading a book, and it will stall out mid download. I can't say whether this is the app, the phone, the wifi or the server. It's sporadic, possibly fixed in some recentish version, haven't seen it for a while.
You can (independently) adjust the skip ahead/skip back buttons between 5s, 10s and 30s. I just leave it on 10s and mash if I have to. Before ABS I used Voice (FOSS, IMO great but I wanted library management too. Not as feature rich as Smart Audiobook Player, intentionally I think.) which only had one set of skip buttons so I never "missed" this in ABS.
Answer for #1 & #2: I do not know.
Answer for #3: yes, it does.
Answer for #4:
Yes, it works reliable. If the server is unavailable everything just works fine. If the server is available your current position is synchronized so you can continue on a different device.
Long time user of Audiobookshelf and Smart Audiobook Player.
Audiobookshelf on Android, at least on some devices, kills your battery, I only use the official app to download the files and then I use the Smart Audiobook Player to listen.
I've also been using this for a while now and it works great. My only complaint is that tools for cleaning up metadata are a bit clunky if you have a very large collection. You can basically go through every item one-by-one, or you can run an automatic script to check the whole collection. It would be great if you could define certain rules to require manual review, and incrementally run the tool to improve the tags whenever you have a bit of free time to clean up your collection.
But the ideal solution would be to have some way of generating fingerprints for each audiobook, and then build up a database which matches that fingerprint to the correct metadata. That way the work of organizing and tagging large collections could be crowdsourced; this is what other communities have done.
Maybe we're not too far off from AI-assisted tools that can just figure out how to properly tag a bunch of items correctly just by looking at the filename and existing metadata. Maybe even picking up on additional contextual clues by listening to a little bit of a chapter, to check if the title of the work is mentioned at the start.
I had to stop using ABS because the Android app has a fatal flaw - you can't queue podcasts. I listen to podcasts while I'm doing dirty jobs, I can't pull my phone out and play another episode manually.
I just use abs to serve podcasts, subscribe to the abs feeds with antennapod. Have a couple of premium podcasts setup that way (so even keeping a local archive).
I've found AntennaPod [1] absolutely brilliant for android podcasts -- it _just works_, downloads the audio files, is robust, etc. Very high quality software. This looks a bit more like a long-term storage solution for podcasts though, rather than shorter term listening. And of course with excellent metadata integration.
I'm currently building an audiobook app. I've considered adding podcast (and even music) support, but wonder if this is something people actually want bundled together or would prefer tailored experiences.
I wouldn't want them bundled together. Focus on one thing - when I want to listen to an audio book I'm not after a podcast or music. I have other apps for that.
Prologue is amazing, have been using it for a year now after seeing it on HN before. Also don't need to run another service for it as I already use Plex.
I run this on my home server and use it to download and listen to podcasts that don't have a video component. It struggled a bit while downloading podcasts with hundreds of existing episodes, no idea if this was fixed since I tried it.
Metadata management is great. The best feature is getting the chapter from audible TOC with start/end times. So you'll get a way to navigate the books you've downloaded and not seek in a giant mp3/m4b files.
They are also alternatives to the official android client. The most annoying feature is that locally downloaded book crash the app. So now it's only streaming.
I have used Bookplayer in the past and it is great - but I don't think it has native ABS support, correct? You just download the files from bookplayer whenever you want to play a new book?
To any podcast listener and trying or having tried and found some great podcast apps:
I am looking for something to replace Overcast (subscribed) with on iOS.
Without getting into what has been happening to the app of late (because that’s not the reason), I would add that whenever there’s an app or service I start using a lot I try to look for an open or openish alternative. (This is just a personal thing I guess). And goodness I have been listening to crazy amounts of podcasts in the last 5-6 years.
I have tried PocketCasts (subscribed), Castro, and Downcast and I didn’t really like them (I know only PocketCasts is open — just wanted to give an idea).
I just need: native app, easy import/export, queue (just one would do), easy to reorder episodes, few intuitive row actions, history, ability to save/favourite some of the episodes; and ability to mark mass-played/unplayed (all/selected).
And very easy/swift switching between download/stream.
And most importantly reliable and stable and predictable.
If there’s something great in FOSS and in the works and they are looking for heavy podcast listeners as beta testers I would love to help out if I could (and could even help out on Android code side if at all and if it’s multi platform).
tl;dr: looking for a solid iOS native podcast player app that is not Overcast, PocketCasts, Castro, or DownCast (and I am not deriding these apps)
This is one of the pillars of the selfhosting world imo. Together with Immich for photos, Plex(amp) - arr stack for media, and Vaultwarden for passwords. They've just never let me down.
Maybe openwebui is another addition but it's still early days
Im fairly new to self hosting. I've been playing around with a raspberry pi running raspberry pi os. The documentation says the Debian package is only for amd64 architectures. Im assuming that has to do with one of the Node packages? Out of curiosity, if I wanted to get it to work on an arm architecture, where would I start? My first guess would be trying to install it on the pi and looking at the error messages.
I’ve been running this alongside Audiobookshelf for podcasts to compare the two. AFAIK, Pinepods doesn’t have a native iOS app. Has that changed recently?
What's a good source for DRM-free audiobooks? I'd love to ditch Audible and move to something like this, but I haven't found a store that has a good selection.
(Edit: thank you, everybody, for the great answers!!!)
I understand the audiobook server, but what’s the use case for the podcast part? You replicate a podcast on your own server, in case the original goes away?
It can be configured to automatically fetch podcasts and keep a local copy. If you have a workflow for listening to audiobooks then it allows you use that same workflow for podcasts. With the mobile app you can "check out" audiobooks or podcasts and have any listening progress tracked between platforms.
> You replicate a podcast on your own server, in case the original goes away?
Or, as a couple that I've listened to and might re-listen later have, they later start injecting adverts where they were not previously present, or start piling more in where they were reasonable before.
Some podcast feeds only list the last N episodes, so if you want to listen to episode N+1, you either have to have it already downloaded locally or cache the feed and hope the audio file's URL is valid when you go to listen to it later.
If you subscribe to a paid podcast, you can mirror and share your own rss link with friends, which is better than sharing credentials or your private link, and it won't trip some shared password flag at the upstream server.
Yes, pretty much. You can also post-process them to remove ads etc. because you have the files on your own server.
Some podcasts remove all of their backlog when they "sell out" and go behind a paywall, having them backed up prevents that. (How did this get made?[0] being one example)
Also some podcasts (BBC ones I think) add ads while you download, based on your country. Some of my No Such Thing As A Fish[1] episodes have Christmas themed ads in them because that's when they we're cached :)
I mirror all my podcasts locally as shows do disappear before I listen to them. Wondery has a ton of shows that if you miss the few week window, they're being a wondery+ paywall.
[+] [-] krick|10 months ago|reply
1. Does it properly stop the playback when headphones are disconnected?
2. Is there a usable lock-screen widget?
3. Does it auto-rewind after a pause? It's best when the pause duration is taken into account: it shouldn't rewind more than a couple of seconds if you pause for a second, but a whole minute may be better if you left it off yesterday.
4. Does it handle well situations when the server is not accessible? Can you just pre-download a couple of audio-books for your 10 h long flight? I mean, honestly, streaming is never desirable, the only point of a self-hosted server is that you don't have to download and delete your collection manually. It's a tricky problem when the playlist is highly variable (as with music), but for an audio-book player should be a non issue: just pre-fetch a whole book (maybe manually), storage space is a lesser issue than mobile internet.
[+] [-] apitman|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] GCUMstlyHarmls|10 months ago|reply
2) Yes, but sometimes pressing play wont actually play. I also see this occurring with antenna-pod (FOSS podcast player), so I think this is Android 15 being broken, or they both use the same underlying (non standard?) audio library.
3) The sibling says yes, from checking the github issues, I think its not as "smart" as other players and simply does a fixed offset if you pause for some length of time. Honestly I always figured it ran back a few seconds due to how keyframes [sic] work in m4b files.
4) Yes, I do not have any data on my phone so I basically exclusively download my books to the device and play them offline. Sometimes I do get progress syncing issues, honestly I forget in which direction, possibly it only occurs when I finish a book offline then go online and it resets back to the last "still playing" sync point.
Sometimes I do have issues downloading a book, and it will stall out mid download. I can't say whether this is the app, the phone, the wifi or the server. It's sporadic, possibly fixed in some recentish version, haven't seen it for a while.
You can (independently) adjust the skip ahead/skip back buttons between 5s, 10s and 30s. I just leave it on 10s and mash if I have to. Before ABS I used Voice (FOSS, IMO great but I wanted library management too. Not as feature rich as Smart Audiobook Player, intentionally I think.) which only had one set of skip buttons so I never "missed" this in ABS.
[+] [-] Gratuity0493|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cariocecus|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|10 months ago|reply
But the ideal solution would be to have some way of generating fingerprints for each audiobook, and then build up a database which matches that fingerprint to the correct metadata. That way the work of organizing and tagging large collections could be crowdsourced; this is what other communities have done.
Maybe we're not too far off from AI-assisted tools that can just figure out how to properly tag a bunch of items correctly just by looking at the filename and existing metadata. Maybe even picking up on additional contextual clues by listening to a little bit of a chapter, to check if the title of the work is mentioned at the start.
[+] [-] theshrike79|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] walthamstow|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] midasz|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mrklol|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] azalemeth|10 months ago|reply
[1] https://antennapod.org/
[+] [-] apitman|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] specto|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aembleton|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jermberj|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Philipp0205|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Arn_Thor|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ksala_|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dewey|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] shaunkoh|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rft|10 months ago|reply
Also want to mention that Music Assistant has an integration for it as a media source, so you can listen to podcasts/audiobooks on any speaker connected to your Home Assistant. https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/audiobookshel...
[+] [-] freefaler|10 months ago|reply
Metadata management is great. The best feature is getting the chapter from audible TOC with start/end times. So you'll get a way to navigate the books you've downloaded and not seek in a giant mp3/m4b files.
They are also alternatives to the official android client. The most annoying feature is that locally downloaded book crash the app. So now it's only streaming.
However there are alternative android and iOS apps: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/faq/app#are-there-any-3rd-par...
For iOS the best I've found is:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998
[+] [-] fredoliveira|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|10 months ago|reply
To any podcast listener and trying or having tried and found some great podcast apps:
I am looking for something to replace Overcast (subscribed) with on iOS.
Without getting into what has been happening to the app of late (because that’s not the reason), I would add that whenever there’s an app or service I start using a lot I try to look for an open or openish alternative. (This is just a personal thing I guess). And goodness I have been listening to crazy amounts of podcasts in the last 5-6 years.
I have tried PocketCasts (subscribed), Castro, and Downcast and I didn’t really like them (I know only PocketCasts is open — just wanted to give an idea).
I just need: native app, easy import/export, queue (just one would do), easy to reorder episodes, few intuitive row actions, history, ability to save/favourite some of the episodes; and ability to mark mass-played/unplayed (all/selected).
And very easy/swift switching between download/stream.
And most importantly reliable and stable and predictable.
If there’s something great in FOSS and in the works and they are looking for heavy podcast listeners as beta testers I would love to help out if I could (and could even help out on Android code side if at all and if it’s multi platform).
tl;dr: looking for a solid iOS native podcast player app that is not Overcast, PocketCasts, Castro, or DownCast (and I am not deriding these apps)
[+] [-] midasz|10 months ago|reply
Maybe openwebui is another addition but it's still early days
[+] [-] andnand|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kyriakos|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hysan|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] InsideOutSanta|10 months ago|reply
(Edit: thank you, everybody, for the great answers!!!)
[+] [-] heisenzombie|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dspillett|10 months ago|reply
Or, as a couple that I've listened to and might re-listen later have, they later start injecting adverts where they were not previously present, or start piling more in where they were reasonable before.
[+] [-] erinnh|10 months ago|reply
I use it as my podcast app.
I mostly only have the last 2-5 Episodes on my server for each Podcast. (you can automatically remove episodes if there are more than X)
Though I do keep all Episodes for 3 of my favourite Podcasts.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bubblethink|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] theshrike79|10 months ago|reply
Some podcasts remove all of their backlog when they "sell out" and go behind a paywall, having them backed up prevents that. (How did this get made?[0] being one example)
Also some podcasts (BBC ones I think) add ads while you download, based on your country. Some of my No Such Thing As A Fish[1] episodes have Christmas themed ads in them because that's when they we're cached :)
[0] https://www.earwolf.com/show/how-did-this-get-made/ [1] https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com
[+] [-] unsnap_biceps|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] agnishom|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] senectus1|10 months ago|reply
Pity the iOS app is almost impossible to get.
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] efff|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] loughnane|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] apitman|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rosege|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|10 months ago|reply