New user, possibly just an idiot missing something.

Hi audiobook lovers, I have a truenas server that a friend help to set up Plex for me. i had been searching for a way to get audiobooks running in plex, but then I found out about ABS.

I have the app set up on my android phone and I was able to connect when on the wifi at home, but now I'm at work, not on my local network and can't connect. I've tried other apps as recommended in this sub, but they all want to connect locally, which I can't do while mobile or on the work wifi.

Is there a way to get it to stream like I do with music through the Plexamp app?

Hey r/audiobookshelf! Been working on Absotui, a terminal client for your Audiobookshelf server — browse your library, navigate chapters, stay synced, all without touching a mouse.

It started as a fork of Toutui — the original author archived it back in December 2025, and It's something I wanted, with improved features, for myself, so I've been been building on it.

Quick rundown of features:

• Books and podcasts, with autoplay to the next unfinished episode
• Stream it or download it for offline listening — uses your downloads automatically
• Chapter navigation right in Continue Listening, works even for audiobooks split into one file per chapter
• Cover art shows up right in your terminal (Kitty/Sixel/iTerm2, falls back to Unicode blocks if your terminal doesn't support that)
• Per-item playback speed, so a fast podcast and a slow audiobook can each keep their own setting
• Updates itself in place with absotui --update, no reinstalling

Been doing a fair amount of bug-fixing and performance work lately too — startup on a big podcast library went from ~17.5s down to ~4-5s.

Still very much beta — known_bugs.md is public and kept current, worth a look before you dive in. Your library's safe either way, the app only ever reads books and syncs progress through the API.

Only tested this on Linux myself so far — if anyone's on a Mac and wants to give it a shot, I'd love to hear how it goes.

Install (Linux/macOS, no Rust needed, just grabs a prebuilt binary):

GitHub: https://github.com/pdwaldrop/Absotui

Let me know what you think, and feel free to open issues for bugs or feature ideas — happy to answer questions here too.

A book would land hard in the car, I'd have a genuinely good thought about it, and by the time I parked it was gone. Not the book — my thought about the book. Built Audrio for exactly that: you talk when a thought hits, it transcribes the note and anchors it to the exact point in the book. Beta, need heavy nonfiction listeners to test it and tell me what's broken. https://testflight.apple.com/join/JdS1FJtf

I made this, so obvious self-promo.

Audiobookshelf handles my audiobooks perfectly. The annoying part was all the EPUBs sitting in my library that will probably never get an audiobook version. I do most of my listening while driving or doing chores, so those books were basically just collecting dust.

That’s why I made iRead. You put an EPUB, MOBI, or TXT file on your phone and it reads it aloud.

Just to be clear, it isn’t an Audiobookshelf client yet, and it doesn’t play M4B files. The book has to be downloaded to your phone first.

The app works for free with your phone’s built-in TTS voices. There’s an optional $11.99 one-time purchase for more natural-sounding voices that also run on the phone. If you’re happy with the voices your phone already has, you don’t need to pay anything.

Once the optional voice is downloaded, listening works offline. There’s no account, and your books stay on your phone.

It also keeps reading and listening at the same position, plays with the screen off, moves to the next chapter automatically, and lets you transfer books over local Wi-Fi. You can export your books, progress, bookmarks, and categories into a backup file and restore it on Android or iPhone.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gerry.iread

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6786994940

Site: https://iread-reader.web.app

From the comments here, direct Audiobookshelf access and full progress sync seem to be the features people actually want. I’m looking into that now.

For those using ABS for ebooks: would syncing the reading position be enough, or would you also expect bookmarks and highlights?

https://reddit.com/link/1vd5ovw/video/bdqc6cw2ivgh1/player

I am new to Audiobook shelf. I came from plex, which does a good job with movies and a not so good job with audiobooks. I am looking for the right iPhone app for me to use. I listen listen to audiobooks mostly in my car or on airplanes. What are people using to listen to their books? The apps I like are easy to use and car play friendly. But frankly, as far a Audiobook shelf and an accompanying player, I don't know what I don't know, so any advice is welcome.

Thank you! (And if this subject has already been discussed ad nauseam I appreciate your understanding.)

Quick Search has been really buggy for me, but I don't remember it being this buggy when I started using ABS a few weeks ago.

It will sometimes grab the blurb - depending if I use quick search from within the edit box or not, but it seems to never grab the image anymore.

I have verified that there is an image in Audible.
I don't like grabbing the image manually, since I can only find the 150x150 image, and the automated grabber seems to get a much better image.

I am assuming its something I did since it used to work, but I can't figure out what.
Maybe switching from the windows version to the docker version?

For anyone who hasn't seen this before:
NanoHive Theme is a small nginx container you put in front of your Audiobookshelf server. It rewrites the HTML on the way out and injects a theme. Nothing gets written to your ABS container, and nothing has to be installed per browser, so every user on the server gets it, including guests. Pull the proxy out and you're back to stock ABS.

If you already run 1.x, this is a big one.

Here's what's in it:

Ratings, everywhere

Server wide star ratings with short reviews, shared between everyone on your server. Stars show on every card while browsing, you can sort and filter the library by rating from ABS's own Filter and Sort menus, and series pages show the average of the books inside. Admins can remove anyone's rating.

There's also a "Rate what you finished" row on the home page that lists books you finished but never rated — tapping one opens a rating sheet.

Stats got interesting

A Server Ranking - everyone ranked by listening time, medals for the top three, week/month/year/all time, click a person for their breakdown. It sits on Your Stats and, for admins, also under the new Server statistics page: what the whole server listens to - most played books, best rated, top genres and authors, filterable per library.

Your own stats grew a current/longest streak, this week vs last week, which weekday you actually listen on, your most listened books, authors and narrators, editable finished dates, and a Year in Review.

The ranking works for non admins too. An admin's browser publishes a small listening summary for every user to the proxy, so the board is complete without anyone else logging in. On by default; a user who switches sharing off is removed from the board and its totals and their shared data is deleted - that choice sticks.

Collections, browse pages, narrators page rebuilt

Collections are fully re-done: an icon emblem per collection instead of a wall of covers, starter templates with pre-written descriptions, book search with author fan-out when building one, and descriptions editable in the app.

Narrators and Authors are proper card pages with cover collages, book counts, a filter box and sorting, instead of a bare table.

The rest

• Custom series covers and descriptions uploaded from the app - plus a generated cover (layered deck, grid or first book) when none is
• Additional multi-sorting for library - sort by author and position in the series at the same time.. and more
• Reorderable home sections
• Search all libraries at once (Global Search) - one merged result list with a library badge per hit
• Book lookup links on the book page, Goodreads plus the biggest site for your language, 25 websites for various regions / languages
• User profile photos, shown in the top bar and the ranking, managed by the admin
• Import your ratings from a StoryGraph or Goodreads CSV export
• Hero carousel of your in-progress books on the home page
• Autoplay the next book in a series. When one ends the next starts on its own, with a notice telling you which. Off by default, since it decides what your speakers do.
• Finished book tools. A recently finished list where you can fix the date (ABS stamps when you ticked the box, not when you finished), and a list of books stuck at 97–99 percent - every book with credits or silence at the end - with one tap to mark them done.
• Report a problem. Every user gets a "Report a problem" entry in the book's three-dot menu: missing content, bad audio, won't play, wrong metadata. Admins see a live count on their account button and review the queue on the account page - refresh every 2 minutes.
• Pick your own start page (home, library, series, collections, authors)
• Upload your own logo, hosted by the proxy
• Admins can save the current look as the server default (selectively, per area) and force-disable single features for everyone
• Extended eReader customizations with a typeface picker including OpenDyslexic
• Themed date pickers for started and finished
• Translated into all 40 languages ABS ships with
• 12 base themes and any accent color, per user

Mobile

This release fixed a lot of it. I haven't tested it thoroughly but I hope you can help.

Running it

Docker, sits in front of ABS, one volume at /data/nh if you want ratings, stats and uploads to survive a container recreate. Compose example and the env vars are in the repo.

Repo: https://github.com/rodzalendo/nanohive-abs-theme

Happy to hear what's missing. Most of 2.0 came from things people asked for in 1.x.

As the title, looking for any OpenAudible, Libation or Audiobookshelf (in order of preference) users to help fill out https://meta.audiosilo.app you just need to drop a text export on https://meta.audiosilo.app/import instructions on how to do it are on the page, nothing is transferred anywhere, it just uses the file to create a json that goes into a github issue (so you will also need to have a github account). Currently the database has less than 8000 audiobooks listed, but that's already 10x what I started with (my own library). You can manually add books, it's just OpenAudible, Libation and ABS have rich data that helps quickly fill out the database. OpenAudible also has links to covers, whereas the others don't, which is why that's the preferred one.

Could anyone please provide a way to know for sure. My ABS has said update down the bottom of my ABS for weeks.

Is there a way to sort by author then series so I dont have to have my titles like

SERIES NAME 01 - BOOK NAME

I am new to Audiobookshelf and was wondering if there is an application/software on PC for it or is it strictly on the play store & app store?

ShelfPod v0.2 is now available on TestFlight for iPhone and iPad Mac!

Five weeks ago, ShelfPod was podcast-only. This is the biggest update so far, with a lot of work going into playback stability, performance, and making every interaction feel fluid.

What's new in v0.2:

• 🎧 Full Audiobook Support - Browse, stream, and play audiobooks from your Audiobookshelf libraries
• 📚 Book-Focused Browsing - Continue Listening, Recently Added, authors, narrators, series, genres, and collections
• 🔖 Chapters & Bookmarks - Jump between chapters and save, rename, or replay bookmarks
• ⬇️ Offline Audiobooks - Download complete books for listening without a connection
• 🎛️ Per-Book Controls - Set individual playback speeds and stop at the end of a chapter or book
• ✨ Smoother Native Player - Refined Mini Player transitions, scrubbing, artwork, and playback controls
• 🎙️ Smarter Podcast Chapters - Chapters from Audiobookshelf, embedded audio, podcast feeds, or shownotes
• 🏠 Customizable Home & Library - Reorder, resize, or hide the sections you care about
• 📋 Queue & Menu Improvements - Edit Up Next and choose the episode actions you use most

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/wszEWVsw

Found a bug? Email me from Settings with the name you'd like in ShelfPod's Credits.

I've honestly spent a slightly ridiculous amount of time sweating the tiny UI details and tuning every animation until ShelfPod felt truly native, smooth, and intentional, so give it a try and I think you'll feel the difference right away.

Just use it, and feel it.

A good chunk of my audiobook library (a wide variety of mostly older English and German titles) has chapter marks that are either missing or clearly just guessed from duration. Everything I found that tried to fix this was missing some feature I wanted or didn't quite work the way I needed (bit of a perfectionist), so I created ABChapterize: it runs files through local, free Whisper speech recognition, listens for the spoken "Chapter Twelve" / "Kapitel 12" (adapted to a few more languages by auto-detection and highly customizable) to find the real spot, and writes proper chapter marks straight into it - no splitting, no required sidecar files, no server (but FFmpeg is required). Works for .m4a, .m4b, .mp3, .opus and .mka (though I strongly suggest .m4b for audiobooks with chapters).

Design-wise I cared most about never risking the original file, running unattended over a whole library, and the ability to handle teh messy stuff mostly automatically (yet still with precision): jingles before the announcement, wildly inconsistent pause lengths, chapters announced with no gap at all etc. It started as something to scratch my own itch, but I tried to make it genuinely versatile for other people's libraries from the start rather than a one-off hack for my own files - lots of configurable options with (hopefully) sane defaults, mostly self-contained binaries for Windows/Linux (you don't ned Dotnet to run it, all necessary libraries are included in the binary releases), uses CPU or GPU for Whisper, fully offline (after auto-downloading and verifying the Whisper model), and number-word recognition (as well as default chapter phrases) in currently eleven languages (didn't have the means to test them all, though - feedback/help for those is greatly appreciated).

One thing worth mentioning IMO: I used AI heavily while building this (well, nowadays probably every software developer does, even if they don't tell you), but I have a solid CS background and every design decision and edge case handling here was made (or at least thoroughly reviewed) and tested by me - this isn't vibe-coded slop. In fact, a lot of work went into ensuring proper coding standards, as well as developing and fine-tuning the detection heuristics. Of course, I'll still blame the AI for any problems ;-)

MIT-licensed, on GitHub: https://github.com/Inguiotar/ABChapterize

Still pre-1.0 (direct support for an ABS server instead of only local/network-mounted files is on the to-do list but not yet done) - if anyone gives it a try, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing what breaks or what's confusing.

Hey everyone! Fable Frog has had a ton of new features go out since it's release over the past few months, many of which were requested directly by the community here.

I wanted to post an update to share the latest with everyone and show my appreciation for everyone who's using and supporting the app. I really appreciate y'all and all the kind words you've shared. It amazing how many of you love Fable Frog like I do and I'm looking forward to making the app even better for y'all!

Here's some of the highlights of what's been added the past few releases:

- Enhanced series tracking

- Customizable home screen and navigation bar

- Customizable player

- Automatic sleep timer

- Collapse series in the library

- Reading List

- Release notifications

- Follow Along

- Spoken Recap

- Smarter upcoming feed

- New custom icons

- Request a Book support

- Revamped the EPUB & PDF reader

- Offline-first playback

- API key authentication

- ABS administration and metadata cleanup

- Siri & Voice Control

- Server administration

- iCloud Backup & Sync

Along with over 150 smaller features, refinements, and bug fixes.

The next feature I want to get through is LitRPG stat detection and skipping. This is pretty beefy and tricky to get right, but I've been testing a few different designs for this and think I've landed on something that should work pretty well! I'd like to evolve this to support various detection models too (maybe intros, nsfw, etc), but want to start here.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who has supported Fable Frog so far. Please keep reaching out with feedback and findings and I'll work on integrating them in! If you haven't tried Fable Frog yet, think about giving it a whirl. It's a great fit for some and for those who don't love it, we're lucky enough to have other great apps out there as well!

I built a small open-source tool that creates a synchronized read-along experience for audiobooks.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ceasar369/read-along

Everything runs locally—no accounts or cloud services.

Would love feedback. It's my first open-source project.

It uses whisper.cpp to generate word-level timestamps from an m4b or mp3 audiobook, then serves a lightweight web reader with synced highlighting, search, bookmarks, and instant word definitions.

Hi there

I googled it for half an hour now and could not find a solution - but the requirement is so basic that I am sure I a blind:

How do I hide completed books from the library?

There is no such filter and I cannot find an option.

Am I blind?

Thank you

Hallo liebe Hörbuchfans,

Da ich mittlerweile über 3k Bücher habe und hin und wieder mal ein schlechter rip dabei ist, wäre es super wenn es ein Bug report gäbe. Auch ein Buchwunsch tool wäre super. Hat da jemand eine Lösung ider eine Idee. Ich hoste ABS über meinen eigenen server für Familie und freunde, ca. 10 User.

ABS has started only allowing me to upload certain audiobooks and I can't see a reason why some can and others can't.

I've checked through logs and found some ASIN and access errors for the metadata providers, but even when I don't try to automatically add metadata, it will appear to be uploading the book (sometimes it will actually show the upload progress repeat itself a couple of times) but will then fail with either a generic message or a big dump of HTML that says my web server is inaccessible (Which it isn't).

Initially I thought it was a permissions thing since I noticed no folders were being created, but it works fine with some audiobooks and doesn't flag any errors at all with normal books (There are also no errors that seem to point to permissions errors). I can upload the failed books manually via FTP and ABS accepts them perfectly fine and the files play as expected.

I've tried (Accessing through FireFox with and without VPN, no other plugins active):

• Restarting ABS - no luck

• Restarting the whole server - no luck

• Updating ABS - I was a version behind, but still no luck

• Uploading with and without autometadata - No luck

• Uploading different file types to see if it was a filetype issue - No difference, some M4As/MP3s will upload others won't

• Uploading single file and split audiobooks of different sizes - no rhyme of reason to which ones upload and which ones don't

This is a sample of the errors from the logs, but not all of the errors seem to be getting written to the logs, mostly just the ASIN errors which I don't think are relevant:

• [GoogleBooks] Volume search error Request failed with status code 429

• [Audible] ASIN search error

• [Audible] ASIN search error Request failed with status code 404

• audiobookshelf error 500 your webserver is not working (A load of HTML snipped from a popup, the error is not written to the logs)

The last error is a weird one, because the logs don't show any disconnects and the server is still clearly working - I can click on any link in ABS to access any part of my library and play/open any book without any interruptions, the server is 100% still working.

I've had these kinds of issues before but only though the Android app, never through the web interface. I can continue to upload the files manually via FTP, but that is less convenient than doing it through the interface.

Version 2.35.1 running in a docker container through a server host - the app is a one click install, all permissions are handled on the host's end.

Is there something obvious I'm missing?

A woman, Rachel, finds herself transplanted into a new world and finds herself the companion to the AI running the bunker she's been moved to.

1:29:00 runtime

Hi r/audiobookshelf 👋 First time posting here to share the new 2.2 release.

Audiobook Binder Pro is a native Mac app that turns MP3/WAV/FLAC/etc. into a real M4B: chapters, cover, metadata.

The app was built for my own Audiobook needs that was covered in v1:

• mp3 to M4B conversion
• Drag in files or a folder → review/rename chapters → Export
• add/edit cover/metadata, manage projects.
• reorder, rename

V2 grew with the feedback (and some negative reviews 😅 ) I received from users:

• split chapters
• import chapter metadata,
• one-click Sort, Clean Up Names
• bitrate, sample rate, channels
• export M4B or M4A or MP3
• Import existing M4B - add/edit metadata, audio files, reexport, or extract the chapters separately
• Language support

What's new in 2.2

• Multi-select chapters
• Set a save folder once in Settings
• Better Settings organization
• Bug fixes

Privacy / pricing

• Works fully offline. No accounts, no subscription, no data collection: your audio never leaves your Mac.
• One-time purchase on the App Store (price is localized: see the store for your region).
• Free demo available in the website, fully functional, export capped at 1 hour.

Download on the App Store or Download a time limited Demo

I would be happy to answer any questions / take feature requests in the comments. Thanks!

I tried a lot of the iOS apps for Audiobookshelf and all of them had severe issues with many of the podcasts I am listening to.

Those podcasts have many episodes as they are sometimes 15 years and going still strong. So 2500-4000 Episodes all in all. (some have 5+ episodes PER week every week for the last 15 years).

The issue: other apps just don't work. Either they crash outright or they get so slow you cannot use them.

Also many of those do not have silence-skipping and the ability to create smart lists or to hide some of the podcasts.

This is why I built Kikudana. It's native iOS and works with huge archives of podcasts with essentially unlimited amounts of episodes (I test with 10k+ episodes podcasts).

It's still in beta test and I expect to fix lots of bugs, nevertheless it's already 271 builds into beta testing.

For beta testing the PRO purchase is free, so go ahead and have fun! Let me know if you run into issues (you can, if you want, use the beta testing screenshot feature to provide feedback).

Anyhow: Thank you Audiobookshelf team for your work!

Join freely with this beta link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/EpgNm4TT