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Comment by possibleworlds | Hacker News Reader

I wish audiobook apps had bookmarking. I often fall asleep to audiobooks and have to scrub around trying to find my place next time I want to listen. A visual bookmark unrelated related to playback position would be so handy. Seems like obvious functionality to me, does anyone know of an iOS player that does this?

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Some OS-wide integration with sleep trackers would be great. While I've read that apparently these trackers are not so accurate, my experience with the Sleep Cycle app has been that it's probably accurate enough to detect me falling asleep, especially since I have a tendency to actively shake my phone if I'm motionless but awake for a while.

As others have mentioned, some kind of 'stay awake' feature would probably solve the issue too. I'm thinking a non-intrusive beep or shake the indicate that the phone is about to go into 'sleep mode', which can be dealt with by some feedback. the interval could then be set in the app or OS settings.

The nice thing about doing this system-wide is that it could do all sorts of other stuff: turn off notifications (I sometimes forget and get rudely awakened at night), go into low-battery mode, turn off the screen (in case I forget to put it facing down), etc.

I use a combination of Sleep as Android, Tasker, and my Pebble smartwatch to detect roughly when I fall asleep and issue a system-wide media pause signal.

I tackle this by setting the sleep timer in my app of choice, Listen, to fifteen minutes. As the counter winds down it plays a few low-pitched beeps over the last 30 seconds of play and if it detects any movement during that time it resets the timer for another fifteen minutes. It's easy enough to work out where you're up to in a small range.

It also has bookmarks but I never use them.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.acmeandroi...

For Android there is Voice: https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice

I highly recommend [Smart audiobook player](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ak.alizandro.s...). It has loads of smart little features like bookmarks, headphone button controls equaliser etc.

That's my go-to audiobook player also. I have been using it for years and it never ceases to amaze me. The level of control you reach with it almost makes the audio part more paper like.

Vlc at least on linux and android does something similar. If you open a file that you recently played but not finished, it asks if you want to start from where you left off.

This is one of the reasons why I dislike listening to audio books or podcasts at night. You drift off and have no idea at which point. :)

Yes. Presumably this is what the sleep timer is for, though of course you must remember to set it before you drift off. I imagine you could design a feature where every x_interval you check to see if the user is awake and require a user action to continue playing, but then how do you make it so this isn't annoying during normal use?

Does the sleep timer leave a marker for where you set it? Need to double check this, I feel I’ve noticed it before but not consistently enough to know it’s a thing.

Audible is really bad at this. If I set a timer for 15 minutes, and am still awake, I press play (since it pauses). But then it plays without having set a new timer. So to not have it play for hours while I sleep, I then have to take out my phone, look at the bright display, and set a new timer for 15 minutes.

Why cannot pressing play in this instance be like a reverse snooze??

Smart Audiobook Player (Android) has an automatic sleep mode. Also you don't have to press the play button, it indicates the end (fading audio, beep) and you just have to shake/move the device to keep it going, so you don't have to open your eyes at all. It's fantastic.

At best that still gives you a range to seek through. I'm also not sure if on spotify it saves the location at which I set the sleep timer.

Word search would be great to find your place again. Type some words into the text field, and each one gets underlined in a different color, and it draws colored dots (or a heatmap) on the timeline where those words occur. Up and down arrow keys skip to the next and previous.

Same thing for podcasts. I'm actually working on an app to do that, not only "audio bookmarks" but "audio tagging" as well. Associate bookmarks and tags with specific points in time in the audio.

if you could implement some kind of 'are you asleep' feature like this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24397750) I might just buy such an app :).

I'm working on a desktop app, so sleep tracking might not be that useful ;)

Audible does. I believe it even syncs it with your Kindle books, if you purchased both versions.

I was surprised when I saw the Apple Books app didn't have that feature. Seems like a no-brainer to include.

Audiobooks in Kindle is at linked to the text, so its easier to skim pages for where you dozed of. Best solution I've found so far.

couldn't this be solved by integration with fitbit and other health trackers? pause player when tracker detects user is asleep or out of range of device.

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