r/audiobookshelf

hello!! unsure if anyone knows of any apps that have a sort of “social” feature for ABS users. I have ~ 10 friends on my server and we’re all super nosey and like seeing what everyone is listening to / how many hours they’ve listened for. Also it’d be helpful to see like user ratings on books if someone else has gotten to a book before you?

I found the app ShelfPulse but it only allows the root user to see all the info + I had to pay for it. I’ve seen the person who made the ABS theme for the website add some of those features to ABS but I’m wondering if anyone else has any recs for a player app that has a social stat aspect or a separate app that everyone can download.

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the silence, I've been hard at work getting a lot of new features in place, along with some much needed optimizations and bug fixes addressed. Hundreds of fixes, MANY new features now supported. This one's been cooking for a while.

The highlights:

- Alexandria base app is now free!

- Read Along — the app transcribes your audiobook on your device and highlights every word as it's spoken, Kindle-style. Tap any word to define or translate it.

- Storyteller + Audiobookshelf linking — auto-matches the same book across your servers so you can listen in one and pick up reading in the other at the exact same spot. Linked books get Read Along with the publisher's actual text (real paragraphs, headings, italics), auto-synced to the narration.

- Plex Music got a big glow-up — full lyrics view, Last.fm-powered suggestions ("Because you listened to…"), hi-res bit-perfect playback for 24-bit FLAC, and Chromecast/AirPlay casting.

- PDF reading — full in-app reader with progress sync and offline support.

- Plex video upgrades — browse your Collections, "Play All" a show continuously across seasons, and a sleep timer for falling asleep to something.

- Alexandria Wrapped — a shareable year-in-review: hours, top authors, listening rhythm, reader personality.

- Notes everywhere — jot notes in audiobooks (anchored to the moment) and in every ebook reader.

- Watch apps leveled up — volume from the crown, complications, and Dolby Atmos books now stream to the watch.

- Alexandria now speaks German. More languages coming soon.

- Plus: ambient theming that tints the app to your book's cover, scan-your-network server discovery, redesigned reading plans, truer listening stats (overnight sessions count on the right days now), and hundreds of fixes and performance improvements.

As always — feedback welcome, that's where half of these came from. I always appreciate a good idea or someone reporting a bug. This app would not be what it is today without all of the feedback I have received.

I will send out another post once the official release hits the stores. Things were a bit delayed due to a bit of bad weather.

Links:

• Alexandria Roadmap
• App Store Link
• Play Store Link

AI was heavily used; about 70/30 if I had to put a number on it. I wouldn't be able to keep up without it but I think that's the nature of the beast at this point.

As of now, base version allows 2 of 10 services to be used, 3 connections per service can be established. These can be changed/rotated once every 30 days, including immediately after selecting services on first launch.

That is the only limitation. Paid access grants access to all service integrations within the app.

Services Supported:

• Audiobookshelf
• Kavita
• BookLore (EoL)
• Grimmory
• Calibre-Web
• Calibre Content Server
• Komga
• Storyteller
• Plex (Music & Video)
• Jellyfin (Music & Video)

There is a filter to see audiobooks tagged "explicit", but I don't see a way to filter for those that are NOT tagged explicit.

This feels like I'm missing something obvious, but I don't see it.

EDIT (For clarification)

I am sharing the library with a friend so he can listen to a few books, but I don't want to share all the books. Since I don't have any "explicit" books, and the share settings can filter out "explicit" books (it even does so by default), I was hoping to use that tag to filter what he has access to.
I was hoping to filter for non "explicit" to double check that I gave him access to all the books he needed. But I am not seeing a way...

I have an issue I presume has been asked before, but I can't find it here. So I apologize in advance if I missed this topic.

The Problem

When I have a downloaded book in my client, I sometimes notice that clicking play does nothing. If I press the 30s back or forward buttons, it will reset my progress to the beginning of the book. If I instead move the scrubber a little to the left or right and hit play, it usually works. If it doesn't, I just have to move the scrubber a little more before it works.

What I'm Using

The files I'm playing are MB4 files that I downloaded through Libation. I have tried many different clients, including Prologue, AudioBooth, and, recently, the Audiobookshelf beta app, and the same thing happens on all books. My ABS server is local only for now, but the problem does happen when I'm on the network. For some reason, when I had Plex as my audiobook server, this was not a problem on the Prologue app.

What is this problem I'm having? Is this a configuration problem? Can someone help me explain what is going on and how I can fix it?

I love listening to audiobooks but I can not afford to pay for a book that I am going to finish under a day. So I would like to know where to listen to books för free , like actually for free so I don’t have to spend so much money on books . And I am not talking about Libby of hoopla because I don’t live in the US or the app Audible .

Hi, I'm just wondering if someone could point me in the right direction to automate audiobooks in the same way the arr stack does? I see readarr has been retired and bookshelf is getting going. But I can't seem to get it to work for me. How do you guys handle importing your libraries?

I’m the guy who posted the HushBook abs support post, I wanted to understand where users have their servers up? Is it a VPS, or on their home systems say Mac, PC ?

I’m working on progress sync and hit few snags on compatibility with IP address that changes on every new launch on PC system this breaks the progress sync and also makes previous instance obsolete.

Would like to understand so that I know if it’s feasible as I’m stress testing these here

Hello all,

I'm wondering if someone could gently point me towards the glaringly obvious mistake that I'm missing.

I'm happily sorting my folders, and everything is working well, when I suddenly get the genius idea that instead of having numerous libraries for Arthur C. Clarke, PKD, Frank Herbert, etc., I'll just make a Library called Science-Fiction and have all of these author folders (now sub-folders) sat in one big Science-Fiction folder.

It seemed to work until I realised that it had just cherry-picked twelve books from the sub-folders for my Science-Fiction library and added no more.

I gave it a re-scan, just in case more needed to come through. Nope.

I checked my tags in MP3tag, and all seemed okay.

So, believing I'd knackered it up somehow, I deleted the library, restarted my Audiobookshelf, and created the Library again.

Same thing. Same books. Cherry-picked twelve books from the sub-folders.

I've no idea what I'm doing wrong, but clearly I am.

Can anyone kindly point me towards the simple fix, and I'll leave quietly apologising.

Hi,

I have the following issue: I am migrating from my old Synology NAS to a new NAS running TrueNAS. I ran ABS in Docker on the old and plan to run it the same way, with one major difference: old ABS had two libraries (both with audiobooks; for ebooks I use other software) and in my new NAS I united these two libraries. I can easily start a new ABS container, but I want to keep my reading stats, gathering of books into series, etc. So, I am thinking about taking backup from my old ABS and changing the SQLite database inside (backup file has the extension .audiobookshelf but it is just .zip file). I asked AI how to change to receive my goals and it suggested the following:

-- Update paths in the library settings themselves

UPDATE libraries SET folderPaths = replace(folderPaths, '/books1', '/audiobooks');

UPDATE libraries SET folderPaths = replace(folderPaths, '/books2', '/audiobooks');

-- Update paths for each specific book in the database

UPDATE libraryItems SET path = replace(path, '/books1', '/audiobooks');

UPDATE libraryItems SET path = replace(path, '/books2', '/audiobooks');

-- Update paths for individual audio files inside the books

UPDATE libraryFiles SET path = replace(path, '/books1', '/audiobooks');

UPDATE libraryFiles SET path = replace(path, '/books2', '/audiobooks');

This assumes that old libraries had paths '/books1' and '/books2' and the new will be '/audiobooks'. The suggested change seems logical, but AI often gives total bullshit that seems logical. Therefore, if anyone had a similar experience, please share!

Thanks!

This is probably a dumb question but I am not an iPhone user or a developer and was just curious. When I first started using ABS, my iPhone users had to install Plappa because the ABS app isn't available except to a select group of test users. Since then everyone has started raving about Absorb, and when one of my users was having an issue with Plappa I decided to give absorb a shot. My question is why is an app like Absorb available to everyone but the official ABS app is stuck in some test mode?

Haven't done a Lull post here since the original one. As of 1.7 everything except the Watch features are free. The premium features are the watch sleep detection, and books and podcasts on the go right from your wrist over cellular.

I love the sleep stuff, but I use Lull all day, every day. It's my everyday player, and I wanted that to be free for everyone. This group also gave me a ton of feedback early on and a lot of it ended up in the app, so thanks for that.

On a recent vacation to Aruba I found a few offline problems in airplane mode, and while fixing those I managed to introduce a couple bugs those should be fixed in the 1.7.2 version that is live today; I've had about 5 solid days/nights while with waiting for the review to pass. If things were buggy please upgrade to 1.7.2 and give it another shot.

If you've got an apple watch, here are 500 codes as a thanks!

https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6775313582&code=ABSREDDITTHANKS081126

Not out yet, but next up in 1.7.3 is Skins. 12 themes: Night, Midnight, Library (wood + brass), Observatory (starfield), Nebula, Forest, Candlelight, On Air, Ink, Paper (the one light theme), High Contrast, plus Auto (your day theme by day, pure black through your quiet hours). The old OLED toggle migrates to Midnight automatically.

1.7.3 is still in review for beta testers and will hopefully pop up shortly. If your interested in joining the beta test group to be one of the first to try out new features https://testflight.apple.com/join/H6pQY5Nu

Hope you get as much enjoyment out of Lull as I do!

Is there a way I can load my audio books from my sd card into ABS. I don’t want to self host. All my audiobooks are on my micro sd card I use for my ereader. I’m trying to find a way on the app for it to get my audiobooks from my sd card. Tell me it’s possible!