Audiobookshelf: Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server

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.

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.

I use ABS to host my audiobooks and I use the Android app to download them to a folder, and then use Smart Audiobook Player to play them. It works great, though you lose the time syncing with the server, if you care about that.

There are also alternative clients, like Lissen.

1 and 2 are system functions primarily. 3 yes, configurable 4 as expected- streaming resumes if it can, you can predownload

The android app has improved a lot lately, it's perfectly fine to use.

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.

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.

History. I keep losing my place on books with random touches, and I dislike the process of finding it again through sampling. Spoilers! The history feature fixes that.

And the built in equalizer. And the speed shifting. And the file management. It's just a great app.

I run ABS on my laptop, and the main issue I run into is that when my laptop changes networks (i.e my vs my parents wifi), it completely breaks syncing. I wish you could set up a server and say 'this will be available on x,y, or z ip, try them all'

The android app does allow you to download audio books for offline listening, which I use a lot when driving. Unfortunately the 'playlist' doesn't seem to just autoplay the next book. I don't like interacting with my phone behind the wheel. Not sure if it has an android auto app or not.

Same here. I do this because ABS android app would not accurately track my listening progress, and is very frequently off after a pause. May be off by 30 min, by an hour, gets rather frustrating relistening the same segments. Was never able to solve this.

Use tailscale or another private VPN to not suffer from changing networks.

Thanks. Also how do you get books onto your phone for Smart Audiobook Player in the first place?

The end-to-end principle would suggest this should be solved by the app and server.

You get history in the ABP android app.

I used to use Syncthing with a custom .stignore to exclude all but the books I want to listen to offline.

One thing LLM's could do for me is a "recap" feature. I sometimes completely forget listening to books when I'm halfway through. So I'm either having to Google for synopsis per chapter or just start over. Mostly i just pick something else to listen. If it could recap up until where I'm at that'd be pretty neat.

It has Android auto, I've used it in a previous car and it's decent enough. Like the other commenter said - I'd install tailscale and connect via that.

I use Listen Audiobook Player. It seems to meet your standard list. I also add: decent tool for fetching cover art.

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.

Honestly, for me it's kinda minimal, simple and ergonomic UI is the point. It has some more sophisticated features, but they don't distract me, nor I actually need them. For instance:

- bookmarks (I tried to use them, but it's too much work, if I really need to take a note, I better do it in written form)

- UI to write down characters (same: I used it a couple of times, just because it's there, but it's not worth it, use normal note-taking app for note-taking)

- equalizer (I'm sure somebody uses it, but I never truly needed it for audio-books)

And many more.

What actually matters are small details:

- Granular playback speed control. ABS seems to have it done right too, but some players have like 1-1.25-1.5-..., which is not granular enough to get normal conversational talking speed out of somebody way too slow.

- It is possible to enable ID3, but it doesn't force it either.

- It recognizes chapters in whatever I have. m4b, mp3, cue, many files in a single folder, many nested folders, whatever. If it gets things wrong, it is possible to merge books in the library. I guess, the worst case is if I am overzealous with chapters (like marking chapters in a youtube podcastwhich has a mark like every 2 minutes), but then again, it only means "stop at the end of the chapter" becomes not feasible, but otherwise it's fine.

- I guess, every audio-book player does, but still: it does remember positions in multiple books, so I can switch between lectures and fictions and get back to where I stopped.

- It takes into account the current playback speed when estimating how much time is left.

- It is possible to remove buttons you don't need, it's possible to choose an action at the end of the book, it's possible to choose a lot, but defaults are really just fine for me.

- I never used it, but thinking about your question I just found out it has "Skip start/end" functionality. This is just great, I'm excited to try it out ASAP.

Anyway, I probably forget some small details, so you better take a look yourself. It's not perfect, but good enough to study when building something similar. I can also suggest 1 thing that is not in SABP, and, again, it's important to not overload the UI, but I sometimes wished it was there. In SABP it's only possible to either stop after X minutes (with sleep-suggestive volume fade), or at the end of a chapter (without fade). Sometimes I wish I could tell it to stop at the end of a chapter approximately after X minutes (like, if it has a chapter every 7-15 minutes, and you are planning to listen for about 30-40 minutes more, but you don't want it to fade volume an to stop in the middle of a chapter overall). So it's either "approx X minutes" or simply "N more chapters". Neither is possible in SABP.

Also, I don't know it I actually want it, but it seemed nice listening to podcats in NewPipe (SABP doesn't have it). There is an option to skip silence in NewPipe. I didn't actually use it too much, and the last time was a while ago (I pretty much stopped to listen podcasts on it), but I seem to recall it worked nicely.

Samba.

Also check out Lissen, an Audiobookshelf client for Android

https://github.com/GrakovNe/lissen-android/

Does SAP integrate with samba or do you have to download files manually?

Thanks!

There is also buchable and vaani. Havent tried them all ywt but all on my todo

If the server entry is by DNS name then all is well, if by IP address, then its not so flexible and will complain/not-work.

I think there are plans to rectify this behavior in a future release though.