Show HN: I built an audiobook player that syncs with your physical book
earleaf.appHey HN! I recently switched to Android after 15 years as an iPhone user. What I missed the most after switching was my old audiobook player, and I couldn't find one I liked. So I decided to build one.
It's called Earleaf, and lets you play your local audibook files.
The feature I'm most excited about is Page Sync. You take a photo of a page in your physical book (or e-book) and the app finds that position in the audiobook and jumps to it. It works by transcribing the book on-device, and when you take a photo, it uses ML Kit to do the OCR scanning, and matches the text against the transcription. The initial transcription takes a while, but that's a one-time thing, and when it's in place, the actual search takes about two seconds on my device. And everything runs locally.
Aside from Page Sync, it's a full-featured player with nested collections, independent listen-through tracking, and a pretty good statistics feature. There are no accounts, no internet required, no ads.
Happy to answer questions about the app and its features! Dope idea, I don’t know why it didn’t come to me first. I usually receive physical books and the first think I do is buy the audio version instead. Cheers! Yeah, I've been switching between both mediums for a couple of years now, and this feature has really made things so much easier! I've actually been surprised at how smoothly it works.