Downpour: DRM Free Audiobooks | Hacker News Reader

Downpour: DRM Free Audiobooks

downpour.com

179 pointscheph57 comments

More DRM-free media: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide.

Thanks for this, https://www.audiobooksnow.com/ also looks like a good option for DRM free audiobooks. I think people should definitely vote with their wallets here as there are alternatives. I can find almost everything I want on downpour (and possibly audiobooksnow) and the monthly fee is lower than what I was paying at audible.

The other big one is libro.fm, which I also think has the nicest website, for whatever that's worth. There's also Google Play, but they always seem to be more expensive.

I've been using a combination of these three sites (libro.fm, downpour.com, audiobooksnow.com) for many years now. Although I do occasionally need to hop back over to Audible for one of their exclusives, but not often.

Quick note about audiobooksnow.com, they do have a small number of DRM'd titles. Check for a "Downloadable" icon before buying!

This looks like a very cool service, but there are a few problems with DRM music I've been unable to solve, I would love to hear suggestions if anyone has this figured out. But for now I haven't used anything better than audible.

1. Syncing audio between devices. (i.e. switch from listening on my phone to computer, etc)

2. Automatically back up the files, so when I switch devices the books are still there

3. A good app that that at minimum has the ability to listen to the audiobooks at double speed, but it would be nice if it could load the album art for free, and book description.

4. Also, it's really nice to say "Alexa, ready my audiobook", and it continues from where it left off.

The downpour app does all of this. Of course it only works for downpour books, but if you get another good app you can download the MP3s and use them in there also.

"Simple Audiobook Player" on Android is just wonderful. Requires one-time purchase for some features I believe, but I've been using it for years without a single thing to complain about.

It also handles chapters, playback speed is very adjustable, and a feature I like the most is that it takes you back to the beginning of the sentence if you pause/resume.

The only thing I would want for it is to have a desktop version and syncing between devices.

Sounds like you want a podcast app. Pocket Casts can do all these things. (Cloud upload needs a Plus subscription, though. But you could also self-host your own RSS feed with your files.)

> But you could also self-host your own RSS feed with your files.

That is a brilliant idea and now I want to do this!

I already have a little PHP script that makes an RSS feed out of any txt files it finds in the same folder, it should be easy to switch to a podcast feed...

I love this app for podcasts, but their file upload has a 1gb file limit which is a bit limiting for some books.

That you can solve by either splitting the file or converting it into a lower bitrate/mono/different codec.

I personally use syncthing to push audiobooks to my mobile device and "smart audio book player" on android to play them at double speed. I even sync back up the played location. Being able to resume playback on device, I'm not sure, I've not had need of that.

> I personally use syncthing

> I even sync back up the played location.

That sounds cool, how do you do it?

I've been using plex for this. You can configure a music library to store playback position and organize like books with tags and then use either Prologue (ios) or Chronicle (android). Prologue is a lot more polished, but I get by with Chronicle ok.

I have a $10/yr subscription to Marco Arment's https://overcast.fm/ for this purpose. "Smart speed" is a total game-changer.

I could be mistaken but isn’t overcast only for podcasts i.e. streaming sources. But the questions are about audiobooks. Or is there a way to import audio book files into overcast?

In 2016, they introduced an upload feature. https://marco.org/2016/03/14/overcast25 Haven't used Overcast myself in a while but I guess that's still available.

Yes, exactly.

AudioAnchor is GPL. Some features include:

Additional features include:

- Set bookmarks

- Adjust playback speed

- Export and import listening progress as SQL database

- Sleep timer

- Lock screen media controls (for Android 5.0 Lollipop and higher)

Available on F-Droid. I can't vouch for it but seems to tick some of the boxes.

Link: https://github.com/flackbash/AudioAnchor

There's also Voice on f-droid, with similar features. I can highly recommend it.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.ph1b.audiobook/

What a coincidence to see this here! I decided just this week to try to get back into listening to audiobooks, and this morning I was sitting here having my usual angst about the Amazon ecosystem and looking at the options. I can’t help wondering if this is one of those things where I think about an old song I haven’t heard in years and suddenly they’re playing everywhere, making me feel I somehow manifested it, but the truth is that the reason I thought of it in the first place is that they had started playing it everywhere because of a wave of zeitgeist. In this case, I can’t help wondering if something about lockdown or current-events burnout is causing folks to want to switch from podcasts to longer form media less filled with hot takes, which is sort of where I’m at.

Another interesting thing on this topic is that Audible now allows signing up within the iOS app, which I don’t believe was possible before. Im not sure if the reason for that has been reported anywhere, but I assume that means one of a couple of things: They have struck a deal to reduce Apple’s cut (seems unlikely), they’re taking a loss to try to solidify their domination of the market, or maybe some combination of taking a loss plus their new business model which involves a lot of cheap “Amazon Originals” content. There seems to be a rush right now between Spotify and Amazon to become the next Netflix of podcasting (which is to say, a closed, subscription-based ecosystem of exclusive content). I don’t think that’s going to be a great situation, but I don’t get the sense they’re super interested in my opinion on that.

In app purchases are most likely a result of the deal that Amazon and Apple struck earlier this year[0].

0: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203294/amazon-prime-vide...

Ah. Thanks.

I've used this service for a few years and really appreciate it. Mostly I use their app, which works perfectly fine, but it's nice to be able to download the DRM-free files so I know I'm not locked in.

Related: LibriVox offers free public domain audiobooks. Obviously, for the audiobook to be public domain the book has to be public domain.

https://librivox.org

Libro.fm also sells DRM free audiobooks, has a nice app, and will work with indie bookstores to be their audiobook provider as well as turn over a percentage of sales..

I use Libro.fm and am happy that at least some of my money ( 15%) is going to my local book store.

When you use text to speech everything is a free audiobook. Unless, of course, the book itself is in a locked down DRM format where you can't access the text.

Can you suggest any high quality, free text to speech software? As an avid audiobook consumer, if the book is not available in audio, I won't read it, but there are some books that I'd like to read anyway.

No. I use Festival 1.96 with CMU arctic voices. To most people they sound fairly robotic but I've been using them for almost 20 years so I like it.

Try voice aloud (using it on android)

I really like google text to speech and use it for my own custom audiobooks, I've tried google's microsoft's, IBM's, and a few other research ones. IBM's sounds slightly better but has a much more restricted free monthly tier, google's and microsoft's has 1 million free characters per month which goes pretty far.

Like others are saying, it's slightly robotic but I've started to listen a ton by TTS and you definitely get used to it (you even start to hear inflection in it, which is cool). I use android smart audiobook app and you can control the sound levels, turning down the high pitch aspects also helps to make it easier to listen to for longer periods of time

For HN folks, there are some pretty reasonable research projects, especially by nvidia (glownet) which you can run yourself. They sound relatively similar but the training voices are much more restricted and not as good. If anyone knows of a github/etc with a nicer diy TTS I'd be interested. The best I've seen which is customizable is https://github.com/espnet/espnet but I had trouble getting it to work, then getting it to sound ok

(For anyone else going DIY I'll warn you that the failure modes for TTS is some unerring frankly creepy sounds. Google's TTS fails very well, even for strange words, and when it gets very confused it spells it out. Some of the research ones go into haunting unrelated syllables, sometimes repeating for 10s of seconds

Ysk Google play audiobooks can be downloaded without DRM. audible books are protected but are very easy download and convert to mp3

Especially for US people don't forget overdrive! It's through your public library and often has a great selection

Are there other apps to use DRM-free audiobooks on, which include the ability to bookmark?

This comes with an app that you can use which is quite nice and can do bookmarks and has a sleep timer. I use bookmobile on iPhone also, but it is not very good.

Hi! I’m the developer of Bound, an iPhone audiobook app. My app supports DRM free audiobooks with the ability to save your place and save individual bookmarks. Please check it out if you are interested: https://bound.timbueno.com/

Thanks. I'll buy this. I've been frustrated about having to use my SSD everytime I want to load and audiobook on my iPhone.

I am certainly liking it a lot!

Been using Bound for a couple of years, it's great. CarPlay is solid and it has upload options for any scenario. I even use https://openaudible.org on my DRM books to play them on Bound, that's how much I appreciate the clean interface.

Hoping for a homescreen widget soon!

Thank you! This is a very attractive reading app. I think I'll purchase this when Im finished with my current book. Is there a way to export the list of bookmarks to a file or email or something? I usually have to manually type them all up with other apps

BookPlayer[0] on iOS works well. Copying the files to the app needs a Mac though. Or you can use Files.app, but it is much slower.

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998

Absolutely love Smart Audiobook Player on Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ak.alizandro.s...).

voice. on android. absolute rocker of a simple foss app. try it

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ph1b.audiob...

+1 for Voice. Has exactly as many features as I want, like sleep timer, bookmarks, and a dark mode. There's no ads and it doesn't cost a dime.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ph1b.audiob...

With such a horribly generic name (one that is shared by an official Google app, and 50 million other apps), I am not able to find the app at all.

Do you have a link by chance?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ph1b.audiob...

Listen Audiobook on Android is awesome. I've been using it for years. I do worry that it might be abandonware at this point, but it works very well. I keeps all the metadata (current position, bookmarks, etc) in the AudioBooks folder (where you store your audiobook files) so it's trivial to back it up, move to a new device, or seven set up sync.

Booksonic.

Friendly reminder that Audible DRM is easily crackable if you're willing to do a bit of googling.

That may be, but by using Audible instead of a DRM-free vendor you're both supporting a DRM-locked provider and not supporting a DRM-free one.

My first preference is always to buy digital media from a company that'll sell it to me DRM-free, when possible. Vote with your wallet, etc.

That's great, thanks for the reference!

Cannot comment on the audiobook contents as I am hardly put off by the website. It doesn't work on my phone as it is loading tons of stuff and on my PC it loads but is very slow, doesn't cache anything. Thats a pitty as I really like having DRM free audiobooks. Will therefore look into the other site metioned already.

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