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Comment by kuczmama | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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