[HN Gopher] Audiobookshelf: Self-hosted audiobook and podcast se...
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Audiobookshelf: Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server
Author : fjk
Score : 179 points
Date : 2025-05-09 02:17 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.audiobookshelf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.audiobookshelf.org)
| rosege wrote:
| Thanks looks interesting
| agnishom wrote:
| I host this on my homeserver. Pretty nice app so far.
| senectus1 wrote:
| been using it for a couple of years now. its an absolute
| cracker.
|
| Pity the iOS app is almost impossible to get.
| rthz wrote:
| On iOS you can use the plappa client. It's open source and
| works well in my experience.
| senectus1 wrote:
| oh nice, I'll have a look into that. thanks!
| PokerFacowaty wrote:
| 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
| efff wrote:
| Been using it for a while, amazing app!
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| 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!!!)
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| Audible books can be.. liberated from such encumbrances.
| There's a program called Libation.
| djhworld wrote:
| 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
| once_inc wrote:
| You can quite easily flash you Kindle with new firmware that
| is more forgiving and abled.
| apitman wrote:
| What's been going on with the kindle? Would be interested in
| reading more about this.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| If you want to sail the high seas, MyAnonaMouse is one of the
| best private trackers.
| udev4096 wrote:
| Audiobookbay has a better audio book collection than MAM.
| Plus, it's a public tracker and doesn't require an invite
| dspillett wrote:
| 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]
| theothertimcook wrote:
| Iirc Downbpour, I've just been using booklibconnect on my
| audibles tho.
| bentley wrote:
| 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...
| loganmarchione wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| So basically Musicbrainz Picard, but for audiobooks?
| volteret4 wrote:
| No, this is a server app for your podcasts and audiobooks,
| picard is the best music metadata tagger imho, but they arent
| related
| jostyee wrote:
| Self-hosted Audible alternative
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dewey wrote:
| 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.
| ksala_ wrote:
| Prologue is great - the last Alpha has support for
| Audiobookshelf (https://old.reddit.com/r/PrologueApp/comments/1
| dnbtf3/prolog...), and I prefer that as I don't run Plex in my
| setup
| shaunkoh wrote:
| Does it still play well with the notorious new Plex app?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| what's notorious about new Plex?
| altruios wrote:
| Enshittification of UI/UX. The new UI is 'optimized' for
| engagement instead of usability.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| I am not familiar with the notoriety of the new plex app, but
| I can confirm that Prologue works well with the latest Plex
| heisenzombie wrote:
| 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?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| 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
| walthamstow wrote:
| I recently pulled the back catalogue of the Acquired podcast.
| All the older episodes going back as far as 2016 have adverts
| for Claude!
| erinnh wrote:
| 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.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| The BBC does this too.
| lawn wrote:
| 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.
| bubblethink wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| 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.
| mrklol wrote:
| Somebody suggested using playlists for that on Reddit, maybe it
| works!
| tonytamps wrote:
| Unfortunately it doesn't. I've been closely watching this
| issue for over a year.
| midasz wrote:
| 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).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Open Audiobookshelf with Firefox on Android and install it as a
| PWA
| krick wrote:
| 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.
| Gratuity0493 wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| fonema wrote:
| 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.
| filcuk wrote:
| 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.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| 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.
| apitman wrote:
| 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.
| delichon wrote:
| 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.
| apitman wrote:
| Thanks. Also how do you get books onto your phone for Smart
| Audiobook Player in the first place?
| dp-hackernews wrote:
| I used to use Syncthing with a custom .stignore to
| exclude all but the books I want to listen to offline.
| dp-hackernews wrote:
| You get history in the ABP android app.
| midasz wrote:
| 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.
| krick wrote:
| 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.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| 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.
| Valord wrote:
| Use tailscale or another private VPN to not suffer from
| changing networks.
| apitman wrote:
| The end-to-end principle would suggest this should be
| solved by the app and server.
| midasz wrote:
| 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.
| Cerium wrote:
| I use Listen Audiobook Player. It seems to meet your standard
| list. I also add: decent tool for fetching cover art.
| cariocecus wrote:
| 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.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Really nice!
| midasz wrote:
| 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
| rft wrote:
| 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...
| kyriakos wrote:
| 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.
| hysan wrote:
| 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?
| kyriakos wrote:
| no still no iOS app but I am using Android so didn't even
| notice.
| gitroom wrote:
| 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
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://antennapod.org/
| apitman wrote:
| 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.
| aembleton wrote:
| 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.
| specto wrote:
| 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...
| thrill wrote:
| It's especially jarring because the ads are at maximum
| volume.
| jermberj wrote:
| 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.
| apitman wrote:
| Has anyone played with the API? How is it to develop against?
| andnand wrote:
| 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.
| apitman wrote:
| Can you use Docker? Looks like they have a linux/arm64 build.
| andnand wrote:
| I was looking to use this as a learning exercise. Im just
| curious about the process of getting this to build for arm
| natively.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I'm looking for self hosted Spotify-alike. Own cloud is not
| really what I wanted...
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