msimonides
Skip between chapters/audiofiles
Is it possible to add the function of being able to skip to the next/previous audio file in subfolders instead of just fast forwarding/rewinding? If I load up an audiobook of short stories so the folder in Audiobooks is called "Short Stories" and the files inside it are separate mp3 files for each story, the only way to listen to the third story without listening to the first two is to fast forward, which requires me to know how long each of the short stories are and also can take a long time to fast forward through. Thanks
The lack of file navigation is an intentional choice. One of the problems of we faced with regular mp3 players was that the playback progress would get reset by navigating to a different file by mistake, often with the user not realizing what exactly has happened.
The app is supposed to do just a single thing, play audiobooks, and be as simple as possible. This means that while it's good for audiobooks it's not as good for collections of short stories, magazines (collections articles) or the Bible (I got reports of users who would like to navigate to specific passages).
I see some need for this kind of feature, although it isn't asked for very often. One way to address this is to introduce a second level of navigation, another is to add more buttons to the playback screen (I'm leaning towards the former).
But in the near future (months) I don't plan to add this feature, sorry.
I concur with Marcin. I work on a derivative of Homer called Aesop (also in Play Store if you want to try it) [Thanks, Marcin]. He and I have taken some different paths, in part because we each have a "target customer" in mind, and they have different needs. My target customer can't see the screen, and is never going to learn audio navigation - just starting/stopping from the buttons is a challenge, but flip to stop and start (both) works. Adding a "skip to chapter" feature has occurred to me, but I haven't figured out a good way to represent that as a "gesture" that the device could recognize (that doesn't involve any more "buttons").
That said, if anyone has any ideas to make that work, please throw them our way.
Hi Marcin,
Thanks for getting back to me. I understand the app is supposed to be simple. My worry is that if one of the books needs to be reset to the beginning the only way to do that is to reset all books in the settings or manually rewind the one book all the way back to the beginning. This means you would need to fast forward every other book back to where it was, and not being able to skip chapters makes this a lengthy process. Additionally, if my grandmother has a 30 min sleep timer on and falls asleep after 5 minutes she needs to manually rewind 25 minutes of audio whereas skipping back a chapter could make this faster. She is used to using a CD player atm and being able to skip tracks so to speak, so I'm not sure she will be able to be patient with the slower rewind/fast forward process. I'll keep checking back on the app every few months to see if this is something that is added in future :)
Thanks
On Mon, 28 Dec 2020, 03:42 Marcin Simonides, [email protected] wrote:
The lack of file navigation is an intentional choice. One of the problems of we faced with regular mp3 players was that the playback progress would get reset by navigating to a different file by mistake, often with the user not realizing what exactly has happened.
The app is supposed to do just a single thing, play audiobooks, and be as simple as possible. This means that while it's good for audiobooks it's not as good for collections of short stories, magazines (collections articles) or the Bible (I got reports of users who would like to navigate to specific passages).
I see some need for this kind of feature, although it isn't asked for very often. One way to address this is to introduce a second level of navigation, another is to add more buttons to the playback screen (I'm leaning towards the former).
But in the near future (months) I don't plan to add this feature, sorry.
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@lamroki Take a look at Aesop for a couple of those issues. On the settings screens (and thus maybe not usable by your grandmother) there are ways to set the position for individual books, so at least you could fix the problem using that. There's also a "swipe" gesture supported that means "go back to the last stop point" (prior time it slept). It keeps several such. Details in the docs. That might be useable by your grandmother. (Let me know how it goes, please!)
Definitely please try the Aesop Player, it has many management features and I see there are some interesting user features I wasn't aware of, like the "go back to last stop point".
Regarding Homer Player, I don't know when I'm going to resume work on this project (currently it's mainly bugfixing), but here are some things that I consider working on that are related to this issue:
- Add a way to at least reset individual books in settings. Maybe even full navigation, so that it is possible to set exact position, like in Aesop. This won't clutter the main interface.
- There are users with widely differing skills. I have been asked to make the whole screen a start/stop button (removing the ff/rew) and to add more features like skipping between files. Maybe the development of this app should go in the direction of a more configurable tool so that it can be adapted to specific needs of a wider group of users (e.g. it's already possible to enable/disable the volume controls, so maybe chapter skip can also be added as an option).
I don't know if this is going to happen though. But I value the feedback.
I recently thought of a half-solution to this, and tried it with one of the short-story collections on LibriVox. It "half" worked. The solution is to "explode" the individual stories, which look like chapters to Homer/Aesop into separate Homer/Aesop books. All that takes is to move the individual .mp3 files into AudioBooks separately (but each in its own directory). From a UI point of view, that's actually preferable because the stories then can be accessed randomly (as if each was a separate book).
The problem with that is titles. In the case of either Homer or Aesop you'd have to apply titles manually. In the case of Homer, that'd have to be done using a PC (or a File Manger). Aesop has the facilities to do that itself as well, but in either case it'd be tedious.
Aesop does get closer, in that it does handle the metadata, but it titles each book (formerly story) with the overall book title ("Album Title" in the metadata), which is the same everywhere. (It does get the story author if the metadata for the story contains it.)
If you think "exploding" the book by chapters, and using the metadata song title as the new book title, would work for you, let me know. I think I see how to do it for Aesop. (If there's a story that uses two chapters of a larger book, there's no way but using a PC or file manager.) (Can you think of a better word than "explode" to call that operation? :-) )