Hi all, I’m relatively new to this whole self-hosting thing and I have been loving it. I have several instances setup on my Debian server except for an audiobooks one. My wife loves audiobooks and asked me a way she can get audiobooks on the fly. I have searched online and found many.

Audiobookshelf is the most recommended one, but I don’t really know much about it beside what I read. Most of it I didn’t understand since I’ve never set up anything like that before. I don’t know the technical details on audiobooks like I do on music for example. So I’m not sure. Audiobookshelf has an app for iOS in test flight but its beta is full. And every client for it has an “in-app purchase” tag and I’m not sure what they hide behind a paywall. I’ve also read that Navidrome (which I already have set up on the sever) works, too but it needs to be “tagged” correctly. I’m not sure how to and what to use to tag audiobooks. I use kid3 for music, would it work for books, too?

I don’t want to commit and go through the whole setup then end up hitting roadblocks. So any info would be very much appreciated.

Thank you all.

  • johnofrobotzAEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I didn’t really have a need for Audiobookshelf until I discovered libro.fm where I found you can get drm-free audiobooks. After I discovered a need, I found the Plappa app on iOS is actually a pretty nice player to connect to audiobookshelf. I still need to use the web app to manage the library. But Plappa provides the listening part, and it also does CarPlay (which is my main requirement for media).

    Audiobookshelf also has a podcast feature you can use as a podcast fetcher - and then play them through Plappa.

    For audio media I use Jellyfin and the Manet iOS app (the only CarPlay media player I could find). It keeps things in separate apps, but that’s what’s working for me.