Apple Event on 15 September 2020 Announcements

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by leebase

"Easy to use" is in the eye of the beholder, of course. What's the difficulty with audible books? There's an audible app. It doesn't sync with iCloud, but it syncs with Amazon's services. Whether I'm listening on an iPhone or an Android table, the Audbile app does well.

One thing that doesn't, for unknown reasons, is Alexa. If I listen to an audible book via Alexa, the rest of my devices don't sync.

My difficulty is it doesn't work the way, _I_ want it to!

I have about a dozen or so audiobooks that aren't audible, so I can't use the audible app for those. At one time they would pull the audiobooks from the Apple library, but no more.

My only real gripe with the way Apple syncs is that I have to select the audiobooks individually, rather than by collection, so it's a bit time consuming to add and delete books from my iPhone.

Both the audible app and the books app have their strengths and weaknesses. I have been using the Apple app mostly because the audible app was only recently updated to include a way of organizing books. My usage is most driven (pun intended) by my in car usage. That means that I want to be able to start a new book without having to pull over so I can find the next book without getting into an accident. Books had collections from the start, and it works pretty well with carplay. Books on my mac will also keep track of the last time a specific book was listened to, so it does a better job of organizing audiobooks.

I suspect I differ from most people in that I have a rather large library of audiobooks that I have purchased over the years (around 800). That means that organization matters a lot to me. Audible is way behind Books in that regard.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

My difficulty is it doesn't work the way, _I_ want it to!


I suspect I differ from most people in that I have a rather large library of audiobooks that I have purchased over the years (around 800). That means that organization matters a lot to me. Audible is way behind Books in that regard.

I see that with a recent update to the Audible app, one can now select an item and Add To Collection... Before you had to create the collection, then select items to add to it, which was almost unusable for large audiobook collections. So it is progress.

But there are still issues with how the Filters work, you cannot apply more than one at a time, for example, view titles that are Not Started AND Downloaded.

In Settings app, Audible has a setting to allow Audible to access ‘Media & Apple Music’. I haven’t been able to figure out what that means: can you play content not from Audible with the app somehow?

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by tomsem

...
In Settings app, Audible has a setting to allow Audible to access ‘Media & Apple Music’. I haven’t been able to figure out what that means: can you play content not from Audible with the app somehow?

It does? I'll have to try it and see.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the audible app has made tremendous progress and plan to give it a try in carplay to see how it works with that.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

It does? I'll have to try it and see.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the audible app has made tremendous progress and plan to give it a try in carplay to see how it works with that.

Looked at Audible on carplay today. Very limited support. It basically just shows a list of the audiobooks that you downloaded via the app with none of the bells and whistles that are on the app. No Categories or anything Books is much better with carplay, which is to be expected I guess.

The audible app does support playing audiobooks from books, those books only show up in the downloaded tab.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Looked at Audible on carplay today. Very limited support. It basically just shows a list of the audiobooks that you downloaded via the app with none of the bells and whistles that are on the app. No Categories or anything Books is much better with carplay, which is to be expected I guess.

The audible app does support playing audiobooks from books, those books only show up in the downloaded tab.

I hardly drive anywhere lately so almost never bother with CarPlay. So you cannot even adjust playback speed?

The Watch app seems to be going nowhere either. Does anyone actually download audiobooks to their Watch? And that seems to be mostly what it is for. It actually appears they’ve removed features that used to be there.

Thanks for confirming it will play Books audiobooks (I suspected as much, I think the option used to be in the app itself). I got it to work also. Apart from that, I wonder what other formats it supports, and where it looks for them?