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:<p>1. Does it properly stop the playback when headphones are disconnected?<p>2. Is there a usable lock-screen widget?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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'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.<p>[1] <a href="https://antennapod.org/" rel="nofollow">https://antennapod.org/</a>
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 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.<p>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. <a href="https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/audiobookshelf/" rel="nofollow">https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/audiobookshel...</a>
One of the best self-hosted app I've seen yet.<p>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.<p>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.<p>However there are alternative android and iOS apps:
<a href="https://www.audiobookshelf.org/faq/app#are-there-any-3rd-party-apps" rel="nofollow">https://www.audiobookshelf.org/faq/app#are-there-any-3rd-par...</a><p>For iOS the best I've found is:<p><a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998</a>
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.<p>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.
For Podcasts I've been using <a href="https://github.com/madeofpendletonwool/PinePods">https://github.com/madeofpendletonwool/PinePods</a>
comes with Apps for every platform. Its a bit rough around the edges but it does the job.
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.<p>(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?
man i still end up juggling three different apps for all my audiobooks and podcasts, would be nice if just one setup handled all the offline stuff and syncing clean