This post is part of a series of free ideas that I’m posting on my blog in the hope that someone with more time can implement. It’s effectively a very sketched proposal that comes with no design attached, but if you have time you would like to spend learning something new, but no idea what to do, it may be a good fit for you.
This is clearly not a new idea, as I posted about something very similar over eight years ago. At the time I was looking for a way of encoding audibooks coming from audio CD in a format that was compatible with the iPod Classic. Since then, Apple appears to have done their best to make the audiobooks experience on iOS the worst possible, to the point that I don’t really use my iPod Touch as my primary audiobook player any more.
As an aside to the free idea, which can probably give a bit more context for you all, let me describe the problems I have with the current approach to audiobooks by Apple. A few iOS major versions ago, they decided to move the audiobooks handling from the Music app to the iBooks app; this would be reasonable, given that they are books, and it was always a bit strange to have them in a separate application, but it also meant you lost the ability to build playlists with them.
Playlists with audiobooks are great, because they allow you to “stitch” multiple books of the same series, so that you can play them for hours on end, for instance if you need them to sleep. I used to have a playlist for the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy radio series and one for the books, one for Dresden Files, and one for the News Quiz, including both the collected editions in CD by BBC, my own “audiobooks” built out of the podcasts, and the more recent podcast episodes that I have not collected into audiobook files yet.
So what is the idea? There are two components that, as far as I can see, are currently heavily lacking in the FLOSS world. The first is a way to generate audiobook files, which is what I complained eight years ago. Indeed, if you look even at a random sample on Project Gutenberg, the audiobook is actually a ton of files (47!) each with a chapter in them. A proper audiobook file would be a single file, with chapter markers, and per-chapter metadata (chapter title, and in that case, the performer).
It’s more than just a matter of having a single file to move around. While of course the hardware improvements made a number of these points moot, the original reason to have a single big file over multiple small files was to avoid having to seek to a different point in the disk in-between chapters. It also allows the decoder to keep going, between chapters, as there is no “end of stream” but rather just a marker that at a given point in time some different metadata applies. Again, as I said this is no longer as relevant as it used to be, but it’s also not entirely gone.
The other component that is currently lacking, is a good playback solution. While VLC can obviously play those files right now, and if I’m not mistaken it also extracts the per-chapter metadata correctly, it lacks two features that make enjoying audiobooks possible. The first is possibly complicated, and relates to the ability to store bookmarks and current-playing time. While supposedly VLC supports the feature for resuming from last playback, I have heard it’s still sometimes unreliable (I have no idea how it’s implemented), plus it does not support just bookmarking a given time in a file/book. Bookmarking is particularly important when listening to non-novel audiobooks, as you may want to go back to it afterwards, to re-listen to advice or take a reference to further details.
The other feature is basically UI heavy, and it involves mostly the mobile UI (at least the Android one) and is the ability to scan backward and forward in the file. You have probably seen this in other players including Netflix’s own app, that allow you to scan back 30 seconds — in audiobooks it’s also useful to scan forward 30 seconds, particularly when considering the bookmarks above.
As usual for Free Ideas I have no time to work on this myself. I can give the idea details out, and depending on things I may be able to contribute to a bounty on it, but otherwise, no code I can share about this yet.
This would be great. However, Dr. M. have locked all my audiobooks in an Android app from Audible (Amazon). I do listen to spoken audio without DRM every day in the form of podcasts. However, there are no great podcast apps for Linux. Vocal could be it for desktop Linux, but the project seems to have died before it got off the ground.A fork of Vocal could be repurposed for audiobooks. Podcast players are just playlist of spoken audio hidden behind a single cover art. The UI is pretty much exactly the same as you’d need for a audiobook library manager and player (sans the subscription and pull-download support.) The playback controls such as play/pause, playback speed, skip-ahead/jump-back 1-minute, and saving and restoring playback positions are exactly the same as would be needed for an audiobook app.PS: If you’re just looking for an open-source audiobook manager for Android, check out Material Audiobook Player (GPLv3, on GitHub).