Audiobookshelf: Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server
audiobookshelf.org207 points by fjk 5 days ago
207 points by fjk 5 days ago
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.
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.
You get history in the ABP android app.
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.
Thanks. Also how do you get books onto your phone for Smart Audiobook Player in the first place?
I used to use Syncthing with a custom .stignore to exclude all but the books I want to listen to offline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Use tailscale or another private VPN to not suffer from changing networks.
The end-to-end principle would suggest this should be solved by the app and server.
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.
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.
Also check out Lissen, an Audiobookshelf client for Android
There is also buchable and vaani. Havent tried them all ywt but all on my todo
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.
I use Listen Audiobook Player. It seems to meet your standard list. I also add: decent tool for fetching cover art.
I've also been using this for a while now and it works great. My only complaint is that tools for cleaning up metadata are a bit clunky if you have a very large collection. You can basically go through every item one-by-one, or you can run an automatic script to check the whole collection. It would be great if you could define certain rules to require manual review, and incrementally run the tool to improve the tags whenever you have a bit of free time to clean up your collection.
But the ideal solution would be to have some way of generating fingerprints for each audiobook, and then build up a database which matches that fingerprint to the correct metadata. That way the work of organizing and tagging large collections could be crowdsourced; this is what other communities have done.
Maybe we're not too far off from AI-assisted tools that can just figure out how to properly tag a bunch of items correctly just by looking at the filename and existing metadata. Maybe even picking up on additional contextual clues by listening to a little bit of a chapter, to check if the title of the work is mentioned at the start.
So basically Musicbrainz Picard, but for audiobooks?
Self-hosted Audible alternative
> But the ideal solution would be to have some way of generating fingerprints for each audiobook, and then build up a database which matches that fingerprint to the correct metadata. That way the work of organizing and tagging large collections could be crowdsourced; this is what other communities have done.
I was referring to this bit, which is exactly what the Musicbrainz database does for music albums.
No, this is a server app for your podcasts and audiobooks, picard is the best music metadata tagger imho, but they arent related
I had to stop using ABS because the Android app has a fatal flaw - you can't queue podcasts. I listen to podcasts while I'm doing dirty jobs, I can't pull my phone out and play another episode manually.
I just use abs to serve podcasts, subscribe to the abs feeds with antennapod. Have a couple of premium podcasts setup that way (so even keeping a local archive).
Somebody suggested using playlists for that on Reddit, maybe it works!
Unfortunately it doesn't. I've been closely watching this issue for over a year.
I've found AntennaPod [1] absolutely brilliant for android podcasts -- it _just works_, downloads the audio files, is robust, etc. Very high quality software. This looks a bit more like a long-term storage solution for podcasts though, rather than shorter term listening. And of course with excellent metadata integration.
I'm currently building an audiobook app. I've considered adding podcast (and even music) support, but wonder if this is something people actually want bundled together or would prefer tailored experiences.
I agree, focus on the audiobooks. That being said, I would love an app that can detect and skip the awful built in ads they've added to podcasts...
I wouldn't want them bundled together. Focus on one thing - when I want to listen to an audio book I'm not after a podcast or music. I have other apps for that.
The canonical advice would be to focus on one thing first and make sure you're doing it well and users want it, then expand.
Can I follow your project somewhere?
It's still really early and I'm currently using some AGPL libraries which means I can't distribute without also being AGPL. I haven't been able to find a good way to make money on an app while releasing it open source. Would love to figure out a way to do both.
A good solution for a standalone server. But since I use Plex already there’s an audio book plugin for it that I use along with Prologue for IOS.
Prologue is great - the last Alpha has support for Audiobookshelf (https://old.reddit.com/r/PrologueApp/comments/1dnbtf3/prolog...), and I prefer that as I don't run Plex in my setup
Prologue is amazing, have been using it for a year now after seeing it on HN before. Also don't need to run another service for it as I already use Plex.
Does it still play well with the notorious new Plex app?
I am not familiar with the notoriety of the new plex app, but I can confirm that Prologue works well with the latest Plex
what's notorious about new Plex?
Enshittification of UI/UX. The new UI is 'optimized' for engagement instead of usability.
I run this on my home server and use it to download and listen to podcasts that don't have a video component. It struggled a bit while downloading podcasts with hundreds of existing episodes, no idea if this was fixed since I tried it.
Also want to mention that Music Assistant has an integration for it as a media source, so you can listen to podcasts/audiobooks on any speaker connected to your Home Assistant. https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/audiobookshel...
One of the best self-hosted app I've seen yet.
Metadata management is great. The best feature is getting the chapter from audible TOC with start/end times. So you'll get a way to navigate the books you've downloaded and not seek in a giant mp3/m4b files.
They are also alternatives to the official android client. The most annoying feature is that locally downloaded book crash the app. So now it's only streaming.
However there are alternative android and iOS apps: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/faq/app#are-there-any-3rd-par...
For iOS the best I've found is:
I have used Bookplayer in the past and it is great - but I don't think it has native ABS support, correct? You just download the files from bookplayer whenever you want to play a new book?
> I don't think it has native ABS support, correct?
Currently, no. I emailed the dev asking for support, and he said he was looking into it.
Hey, does it do podcasts?
To any podcast listener and trying or having tried and found some great podcast apps:
I am looking for something to replace Overcast (subscribed) with on iOS.
Without getting into what has been happening to the app of late (because that’s not the reason), I would add that whenever there’s an app or service I start using a lot I try to look for an open or openish alternative. (This is just a personal thing I guess). And goodness I have been listening to crazy amounts of podcasts in the last 5-6 years.
I have tried PocketCasts (subscribed), Castro, and Downcast and I didn’t really like them (I know only PocketCasts is open — just wanted to give an idea).
I just need: native app, easy import/export, queue (just one would do), easy to reorder episodes, few intuitive row actions, history, ability to save/favourite some of the episodes; and ability to mark mass-played/unplayed (all/selected).
And very easy/swift switching between download/stream.
And most importantly reliable and stable and predictable.
If there’s something great in FOSS and in the works and they are looking for heavy podcast listeners as beta testers I would love to help out if I could (and could even help out on Android code side if at all and if it’s multi platform).
tl;dr: looking for a solid iOS native podcast player app that is not Overcast, PocketCasts, Castro, or DownCast (and I am not deriding these apps)
This is one of the pillars of the selfhosting world imo. Together with Immich for photos, Plex(amp) - arr stack for media, and Vaultwarden for passwords. They've just never let me down.
Maybe openwebui is another addition but it's still early days
Im fairly new to self hosting. I've been playing around with a raspberry pi running raspberry pi os. The documentation says the Debian package is only for amd64 architectures. Im assuming that has to do with one of the Node packages? Out of curiosity, if I wanted to get it to work on an arm architecture, where would I start? My first guess would be trying to install it on the pi and looking at the error messages.
I think the docker container has both amd64 and arm64 versions, so try following the docker-compose instructions.
Personally, I have a Services folder with sub-folders for each self-hosted service. Each service folder has a compose.yaml file, and any additional files that the service might generate also go into its service folder (e.g. /Services/audiobookshelf/ has config/ and metadata/ as well as compose.yaml). I don't need every service running constantly, so I just update and run things manually as needed, but you could automate that. I really appreciate that you can just use `docker-compose pull` to update and `docker-compose up -d` to run the service without having to mess around with anything else.
Can you use Docker? Looks like they have a linux/arm64 build.
I was looking to use this as a learning exercise. Im just curious about the process of getting this to build for arm natively.
For Podcasts I've been using https://github.com/madeofpendletonwool/PinePods comes with Apps for every platform. Its a bit rough around the edges but it does the job.
I’ve been running this alongside Audiobookshelf for podcasts to compare the two. AFAIK, Pinepods doesn’t have a native iOS app. Has that changed recently?
What's a good source for DRM-free audiobooks? I'd love to ditch Audible and move to something like this, but I haven't found a store that has a good selection.
(Edit: thank you, everybody, for the great answers!!!)
If you're not looking to sail the high seas, I highly recommend Libro.fm. They have had almost any audiobook I have ever wanted (e.g., Andy Weir's books in English are only available on Audible), and you can choose a local library to support with your purchase.
I subscribe to their monthly plan, $14.99/month, which gets me 1 credit per month. If you buy one audiobook a month that's $14.99, using that credit, it pays for itself. I really like using my credits on expensive audiobooks, like $25 or something (I'm basically getting the book at a discount) and then I buy cheaper audiobooks using my credit card.
You can stream your purchased books with their app, but I download the files (everything is DRM-free) and move them into Audiobookshelf. Most of their older books are just ZIP downloads of MP3s, but newer books come in M4B format (one large file with chapter markers). Both work flawlessly with Audiobookshelf.
If you buy an audiobook on Audible (e.g., Andy Weir), you can download the AAX file from Audible and use a converter to convert the file to M4B (this strips the DRM and makes it work with Audiobookshelf). This is in a legal gray-area, depending on your jurisdiction.
I primarily source my copyrighted audiobooks from Libro.fm and Downpour. Both have large (though not universal) catalogues.
Librivox has free, public domain audiobooks. The narrators are volunteers, so performance and recording quality varies, but there are some very good ones there.
Some podcasts provide legitimate audiobooks of copyrighted works, generally with similar quality caveats to Librivox. For example, the blog “Readings from Under the Grapevine” has a free, legally licensed recording of the Narnia series (except for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
I never buy audiobooks with DRM, even if the DRM is trivial to break. Amazon has made clear their intentions to lock media down ever further. I shouldn’t have to put up with that, so I’m not going to support them financially.
If I can’t find a copyrighted audiobook at one of the DRM‐free shops, I get it from my library, either through Libby or by checking out a physical copy. Not that these would be helpful for someone using Audiobookshelf…
If you want to sail the high seas, MyAnonaMouse is one of the best private trackers.
Audiobookbay has a better audio book collection than MAM. Plus, it's a public tracker and doesn't require an invite
I've tended to avoid public trackers when I can find what I want on private ones. I'm not sure that they are any safer in terms of consequences resulting from being noticed by media firms and relevant legal groups, but the transfer speeds are generally better (due to there being less leeching presumably), and public tracker UIs tend to be more filled with junk that sometimes gets past my ad/malware filters.
[Not a comment on Audiobookbay specifically, I don't remember having tried that one and it may be great for all I know]
Audible books can be.. liberated from such encumbrances. There’s a program called Libation.
You can strip the DRM from audible books and create mp4s using ffmpeg.
Although, given Amazon’s recent efforts with the kindle, I’m going to say they will probably remove the ability to download books soon
What's been going on with the kindle? Would be interested in reading more about this.
You can quite easily flash you Kindle with new firmware that is more forgiving and abled.
Iirc Downbpour, I’ve just been using booklibconnect on my audibles tho.
I understand the audiobook server, but what’s the use case for the podcast part? You replicate a podcast on your own server, in case the original goes away?
It can be configured to automatically fetch podcasts and keep a local copy. If you have a workflow for listening to audiobooks then it allows you use that same workflow for podcasts. With the mobile app you can "check out" audiobooks or podcasts and have any listening progress tracked between platforms.
> You replicate a podcast on your own server, in case the original goes away?
Or, as a couple that I've listened to and might re-listen later have, they later start injecting adverts where they were not previously present, or start piling more in where they were reasonable before.
You can use it as that.
I use it as my podcast app.
I mostly only have the last 2-5 Episodes on my server for each Podcast. (you can automatically remove episodes if there are more than X)
Though I do keep all Episodes for 3 of my favourite Podcasts.
Some podcast feeds only list the last N episodes, so if you want to listen to episode N+1, you either have to have it already downloaded locally or cache the feed and hope the audio file's URL is valid when you go to listen to it later.
If you subscribe to a paid podcast, you can mirror and share your own rss link with friends, which is better than sharing credentials or your private link, and it won't trip some shared password flag at the upstream server.
Yes, pretty much. You can also post-process them to remove ads etc. because you have the files on your own server.
Some podcasts remove all of their backlog when they "sell out" and go behind a paywall, having them backed up prevents that. (How did this get made?[0] being one example)
Also some podcasts (BBC ones I think) add ads while you download, based on your country. Some of my No Such Thing As A Fish[1] episodes have Christmas themed ads in them because that's when they we're cached :)
[0] https://www.earwolf.com/show/how-did-this-get-made/ [1] https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com
I recently pulled the back catalogue of the Acquired podcast. All the older episodes going back as far as 2016 have adverts for Claude!
I mirror all my podcasts locally as shows do disappear before I listen to them. Wondery has a ton of shows that if you miss the few week window, they're being a wondery+ paywall.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History do this too.
When I setup Audiobookshelf a week ago I also bought the rest of his entire collection from his site, getting a complete library for his show.
I host this on my homeserver. Pretty nice app so far.
been using it for a couple of years now. its an absolute cracker.
Pity the iOS app is almost impossible to get.
On iOS you can use the plappa client. It’s open source and works well in my experience.
Seconded, I've been using plappa for a couple months after Apple messed up PWAs after bringing them back (Audiobookshelf didn't want to change to next chapter when the app was in the background) and I'm generally very happy
Been using it for a while, amazing app!
I'm looking for self hosted Spotify-alike. Own cloud is not really what I wanted...
man i still end up juggling three different apps for all my audiobooks and podcasts, would be nice if just one setup handled all the offline stuff and syncing clean
Has anyone played with the API? How is it to develop against?
Thanks looks interesting
Really nice!
[dead]