Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
BTW, I ran across this project poking around this morning
https://openaudible.org/
It basically downloads. It will load and show all the meta information for an audible book. I don't see a way to change the meta info in the program, but it is an open source program with a github repository, so if you program, it might provide a clue. |
Maybe they intend to roll out improvements in Books? idk. I get the feeling the created the books app with book sales in mind, rather than from a reader perspective. Which is no big surprise, but yeah, as you said, unfortunate.
I wish I did program, because if I did, I'd create this darned app because it irks me that there's this disconnect between what is really useful for audiobook connoisseurs and what we have to work with.
I'm not even joking that in the past couple days, my patience with this issue has gotten so thin that I've been on the verge of looking up how to do it myself and seeing if I could learn.
Ideally, we'd have something that works like Calibre for cataloging on our computers, but which has a device-side player app that you can sideload to (perhaps from Cloud storage?) which has more useful features than you can presently find in most of the audiobook listening apps.
Honestly, there are some podcast apps that are *SO CLOSE* to being ideal.
I fiddled around with Overcast and then I wished I hadn't because that was a waste of $10. I mean, the player is...okay? Nothing special, but it does what it needs to. But the only way to sideload to it (which is the premium feature you have to pay the $10 for) is to upload to THEIR server. You get 10GB of storage, which is fine you can load a decent number of audiobooks there, but the file size limit is 1GB and if you like higher-bitrate audiobooks it doesn't take long to hit that, so it's of limited utility to audiobook listeners.
I went back to Downcast, and for the $3 price, it's really a gorgeous app.
It has the ability to sort by date or title or a bunch of other options, so for series, you can either tweak the release date metadata to fall in proper order, or you can prepend the title with a series index.
I believe it gets the blurb info from the lyrics field, but I'm not entirely certain because I paste it into lyrics, song description and long description to make sure my bases are covered.
It has those great options for skipping forward or backward, but unfortunately they don't interface with the remote controls on the car stereo. Still, it looks great in CarPlay and apparently the lack of Prev/Next buttons on the display in CarPlay is a CarPlay thing, not an app thing, because overcast has the same issue.
The only things Downcast needs to be perfect are:
1) A chapter list. The timeline with the chapter markers is helpful, but if you know exactly which chapter you want to go to, you still have to skip through the others to get to it.
2) The ability to generate a "podcast" (i.e. a series) from the metadata. As it is, when you sideload into the app, you have to create a podcast and add the incoming file to it, or else it goes into an "untitled podcast" listing.
3) Better sideloading controls. The sideloading interface is...clunky. But it works. You can load from iCloud, from OneDrive (if you have the app installed) or using a filemanager app like Documents 6. From the OneDrive app you can select a file and choose "Open in Another App" and it will give you the option to open it in Downcast. You can AirDrop to Downcast as well.
However, I'm a little leery of how the file storage works. I've noticed that as I've been AirDropping to the app, the "Other" file that is supposedly app resources starts to balloon in size, even as Downcast itself gets larger as you load up your books.
Which suggests that I'm ended up with two copies of the file on my device, and I'm not entirely sure if the one in "Other" will get purged automatically or if it's going to present a problem later. When loading with OneDrive, it looked like OneDrive would have a copy of the file while DownCast did as well, because both apps would balloon with each file downloaded and opened in Downcast.
I guess I'll figure it out as I go. Worst comes to worst, I'll have to backup my phone and flush the memory with a reset occasionally.