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Audiobookshelf: Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server
- pyuser583 1y agoReally nice!
- rosege 1y agoThanks looks interesting
- agnishom 1y agoI host this on my homeserver. Pretty nice app so far.
- senectus1 1y agobeen using it for a couple of years now. its an absolute cracker. Pity the iOS app is almost impossible to get.
- rthz 1y agoOn iOS you can use the plappa client. It’s open source and works well in my experience.
- senectus1 1y agooh nice, I'll have a look into that. thanks!
- PokerFacowaty 1y agoSeconded, 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
- efff 1y agoBeen using it for a while, amazing app!
- InsideOutSanta 1y agoWhat'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!!!)
- Arn_Thor 1y agoAudible books can be.. liberated from such encumbrances. There’s a program called Libation.
- djhworld 1y agoYou 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
- navanchauhan 1y agoIf you want to sail the high seas, MyAnonaMouse is one of the best private trackers.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoI'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.
- theshrike79 1y agoSo basically Musicbrainz Picard, but for audiobooks?
- volteret4 1y agoNo, this is a server app for your podcasts and audiobooks, picard is the best music metadata tagger imho, but they arent related
- jostyee 1y agoSelf-hosted Audible alternative
- theshrike79 1y ago> 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.
- Arn_Thor 1y agoA 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.
- dewey 1y agoPrologue 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.
- ksala_ 1y agoPrologue is great - the last Alpha has support for Audiobookshelf (https://old.reddit.com/r/PrologueApp/comments/1dnbtf3/prologue_v4_audiobookshelf_alpha_coming_soon/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PrologueApp/comments/1dnbtf3/prolog...), and I prefer that as I don't run Plex in my setup
- shaunkoh 1y agoDoes it still play well with the notorious new Plex app?
- chrisweekly 1y agowhat's notorious about new Plex?
- altruios 1y agoEnshittification of UI/UX. The new UI is 'optimized' for engagement instead of usability.
- doctoboggan 1y agoI am not familiar with the notoriety of the new plex app, but I can confirm that Prologue works well with the latest Plex
- heisenzombie 1y agoI 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?
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoIt 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.
- theshrike79 1y agoYes, 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/ https://www.earwolf.com/show/how-did-this-get-made/ [1] https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com
- walthamstow 1y agoI recently pulled the back catalogue of the Acquired podcast. All the older episodes going back as far as 2016 have adverts for Claude!
- erinnh 1y agoYou 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.
- unsnap_biceps 1y ago
- walthamstow 1y agoI 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.
- mrklol 1y agoSomebody suggested using playlists for that on Reddit, maybe it works!
- tonytamps 1y agoUnfortunately it doesn't. I've been closely watching this issue for over a year.
- midasz 1y agoI 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).
- heavyset_go 1y agoOpen Audiobookshelf with Firefox on Android and install it as a PWA
- krick 1y agoHow 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.
- Gratuity0493 1y agoAnswer 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.
- stavros 1y agoI 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.
- fonema 1y agoSame 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.
- midasz 1y agoThis 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
- rft 1y agoI 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/audiobookshelf/ https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/audiobookshel...
- kyriakos 1y agoFor Podcasts I've been using https://github.com/madeofpendletonwool/PinePods https://github.com/madeofpendletonwool/PinePods comes with Apps for every platform. Its a bit rough around the edges but it does the job.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- gitroom 1y agoman 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
- azalemeth 1y agoI'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. [1] https://antennapod.org/ https://antennapod.org/
- apitman 1y agoI'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.
- aembleton 1y agoI 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.
- specto 1y agoI 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...
- thrill 1y agoIt's especially jarring because the ads are at maximum volume.
- jermberj 1y agoThe canonical advice would be to focus on one thing first and make sure you're doing it well and users want it, then expand.
- Philipp0205 1y agoCan I follow your project somewhere?
- apitman 1y agoIt'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.
- apitman 1y agoHas anyone played with the API? How is it to develop against?
- andnand 1y agoIm 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.
- apitman 1y agoCan you use Docker? Looks like they have a linux/arm64 build.
- andnand 1y agoI was looking to use this as a learning exercise. Im just curious about the process of getting this to build for arm natively.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoI 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.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoI'm looking for self hosted Spotify-alike. Own cloud is not really what I wanted...
- loughnane 1y agoIf youre just looking to serve your own audio files I recommend navidrome
- freefaler 1y agoOne 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-party-apps https://www.audiobookshelf.org/faq/app#are-there-any-3rd-par... For iOS the best I've found is: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998
- fredoliveira 1y agoI 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?
- JadoJodo 1y ago> 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.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoHey, 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)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]