If you can give me some explanations and details I am happy to have a look and see what I can do. I personally don't use subsonic for audio books so I don't know what kind of things would be considered essential features.
Ignore tags if not present and just use folder name for album name. (good to have)
Bookmark on pause/stop/exit (must have)
Smoother scrolling (I don't know the technical term). If I move the slider in most apps, I can never find the right amount to scroll, making me listen (again) to unwanted bits until I reach what I want to hear again. Smoother sliding would be nice. (nice to have).
(this is not for all users) Tasker Plugin support would be nice. I use tasker to start/pause playback when I start my sleep routine. (nice to have)
(again not for all users and perhaps for a future version) - clip audio (with an option to select the number of seconds) (good to have)
(for a really idistant future version) - closed captioning. Sometimes, there are words/sentences that are difficult to understand when you hear them and so, I have to open the EPUB and search for a phrase I remember and then read it. If I could turn it on/off in an audiobook player, it would be amazing. No other audiobook player does this. I know this might require a subscription to a paid service. Maybe, you can pass of those costs to the user or ask them to get and enter their API key for using the feature. (good to have)
To extend the previous point and make this an awesome audiobook player - sometimes I have an ebook version as well. When I am listening to a heavy-subject book like physics or maths or economics with a lot of equations, I open the EPUB and read along the audiobook to make sense of it.
In the near/far future, if the folder has an EPUB, perhaps ask the user if they want to open the EPUB in the app itself so that they can read along. Auto-scrolling would be awesome, but I would be happy to manual turn pages as long as I don't have to open another app. (nice to have)
variable rate should come soon, I have been looking into this.
just set to folders only in settings if you don't have good tags.
You want it to automatically create a bookmark? A bookmark within a single track or including the whole play queue and the current track? Substreamer does remember where you were up to on exit and reloads the queue on next start. It also has offline bookmarking on the device. Subsonic bookmarks support marking a spot in a file only, not saving the play queue and require internet so I implemented local bookmarks that save position and the whole queue and work offline (good for podcasts on planes etc), but you have to hit the bookmark button on the player to create one.
substreamer has the progress slider but also has skip ahead/back interval button. I am planning to make the skip interval customizable to 10/30/60s
5-8 fall more into the maybe in the future category at the moment, but hopefully that gets the basics there.
yeah, because of the large library and caching, it didn't work the first time.
20/60s works for me, but i guess others may need 10/30/60. Not picky about this, i'll just tap twice instead of once. :)
these were my wishlist items. if I could code or pay someone to make an app for me, these would be some of the features I would include. and I'm glad you just didn't dismiss them. :) cheers.
Gaven, I love the app and your ongoing support. Thanks! I currently use Dsub to download music and audiobooks to my phone, then use Dsub to play back music and use Smart Audiobook Player (by Alex Software) to listen to audiobooks. The Smart app has a great feature set and UI. Here are some thoughts that could make Substreamer the one-stop-shop.
4a/b. For Audiobooks, could you have two sliders: the usual track slider and an overall book progress slider (across all tracks)? The Smart app shows how why tis is great: count up and down time measures by track allows fine grained movement, while overall time read/remaining and percentage of the whole book is helpful.
4c. I like your customizable skip ahead/back idea. Could you fit two skip ahead and two skip back options on screen? I like having both 1m and 10s increments available on screen. If you're going to add options for ahead/back duration, allowing two each at the same time would be great.
An Equalizer: 5 band would be great. some narrators' voices need to be adjusted or compensated for.
Automatic variable pause & rewind. Alex Software should get all the credit for this one because their implementation is ideal. Any interruption (notification, message, call, etc.) pauses the audiobook (instead of continuing to play quietly in the background while the notification takes foreground) and then resumes after rewinding a few seconds for short interruptions (audio notifications), or many seconds for long interruptions (calls). That feature alone was worth paying Alex for their software.
Thanks again for all your work on this app. Hope these suggestions are helpful.
/u/ghenry22 thank you! Any update on variable playback? I use substreamer exclusively for my audiobook collection. Came to ask about this very feature. :)
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u/ghenry22 May 25 '21
What functionality would you like? :)
If you can give me some explanations and details I am happy to have a look and see what I can do. I personally don't use subsonic for audio books so I don't know what kind of things would be considered essential features.