iOS 7 and Audiobook Chapters

Watching this discussion with great interest. Can't believe they made this change.

In the meantime, I found a free audiobook player in the App Store that still recognizes the chapter marks in an audiobook file - it's called AudioGopher. I was just trying to find any way to get back the Rew/FF to chapter bookmarks. I can't see what the names of the bookmarks are but at least they are there.

AudioGopher in combination with the -15sec/+15sec of the built-in iPod player is getting me by for now. Hope this helps a few others until we get a proper fix.

Rob

"I am partially sighted and find it impossible to see the tiny red line for sliding. I've tried using the accessibility settings to change the functions to bold and larger but to no avail."

Does the "Zoom" feature work for you to see the red line? Even when the chapter list is restored -- and I cannot see why they wouldn't do these when there is such an obvious place and need for it -- finding the small red line could be a challenge on the iPhone. I'd think "Zoom" could help.

By the way, I've never had the new player lose my place in a book and go back somewhere else, so I'd guess that isn't a universal problem.

Stepping through the chapters -- either one-by-one or a five chapter jump -- is a slight help until they fix the interface to restore the chapter list.

Apple,

Bring back our old functions for our iBooks, these changes are not working us iBook listeners. It's too easy to lose one place and the fact that we can no longer see the chapters in our collective opinion is os7 taking a major step back instead of forward! I wiped the dust off my old iPhone 3s just because I still have my old functions there. So now I carry that one strictly for my iBooks, plus my iPhone 4 for work, plus my iPhone 5 for personal use, plys my iPad for meeting. Seriously you have made my life more complicated with lack of chapter features in os7!

FIX OS7 SO WE CAN HAVE OUR CHAPTERS BACK!!!

In iTunes on your computer, click on the audiobook, Get Info, and make sure that under Options that it is set to Remember Position.

Just don't try to sync a iPhone 3GS to iTunes 11.1 or 11.1.1. It won't sync with my MacBook Pro running 10.7.5.

Real pain, I know.

Message was edited by: MacinNW_Brent

If you are using audible audiobools, the audible app is still allowing chapter selection, although, as a visually impaired person, I am not happy about font size and other functions of that app. In the past, I have avoided using it and downleaded books into iTunes to run them on the Apple app, but now I am going back to audible. Ugh - it really is stupid. How can anyone at APple in charge of a specific app regress to that extend and take away features that were once there.

This is turning into a real pain. I use my phone to listen to nothing but audiobooks. What a step back! Does the team that works on the music app listen to audiobooks? I think not. Steve would have made them eat their own dog food.

I found this thread because I am an app developer of an audiobook player, Bookmobile (http://freshmowed.com/bookmobile/), and the ability to read chapter information from downloaded m4b audiobooks is broken in iOS7 (however, it is available if the M4B has been transferred to the iPhone/iPad by syncing with iTunes).

I think Bookmobile will solve a lot of the problems you are having.

I wrote the app originally because I found the Music app was terrible for listening to audiobooks (and I listen to a lot of audiobooks) for many of the reasons stated here: losing your place, scrubbing doesn't work with long audio, cover flow was a disaster for losing your whole book, etc..

Bookmobile fixes all of those problems. It creates bookmarks automatically with every event (phone calls, pausing, switching apps, etc.), so it is hard to lose your place. There are no scrubbers/sliders -- you can jump fixed amounts forward and backward in 5/30 sec/min increments.

Chapter information has never been available to 3rd party app developers for DRM protected audiobooks (purchased from iTunes or Audible.com), and I've found the chapter markers often don't actually match the location in the book. If you get your audio elsewhere (Librivox, CDs, m4b audiobooks, mp3s, etc.), Bookmobile will read chapter/file info and let you swipe between parts/files/chapters.

My goal is to make Bookmobile the best app for listening to audiobooks. If you find it doesn't do what you would like it to, or have ideas for improvements, let me know.

Here's the link to the app in iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bookmobile-audiobook-podcast/id416457527?mt=8&at =10lb9Z

-Duke

Duke, a few suggestions:

- make the scrub bar active & larger

- move the elapsed time & time remaining to another level from the scrub bar

- make the forward/backward buttons smaller (5 seconds is too small an increment)

Personally, I don't care about the podcast features.

If I were still running iTunes 6.1.3, your app would just be duplicating Music.app, so the price is a bit high.

Thanks for the suggestions.

As a number of people of said in this thread, scrub bars don't work for audiobooks. For a 5 minute song, great, 2 hour video barely "ok", but a 10 hour audiobook, no way. There just aren't enough pixels. Apple (and others) have tried with the pull-down-and-over to adjust the rate, but you still lose where you started and you really have to concentrate or you end up zipping all over the place.

The real key is having the app not lose your place in the first place, and making it easy to jump back to a position based on time or event.

The 5 second button also jumps 5 minutes. The center "clock" button toggles between seconds and minutes.

If the Music app works for you, great, it's free. I found it very frustrating.

Thanks again.

-Duke

I agree. Apple fix this.

I'm not seeing any problem with Music not returning to where I left off.

I suspect that they might not have turned on the Remember Position for the individual audiobooks. When I import one into iTunes, I have to turn this on in Get Info > Options.

how do i open up my library with the alt option key

Duke, I have a few questions for you.

I'm asking these because I'm an audiobook author, but I don't even have an iOS x device, so I can't directly try your app. I'm following this thread because I'm trying to offer advice to potential users of my audiobooks, many of whom do have iOS devices. I appreciate your writing an audiobook app!

First, does your app allow people to see and select audiobook chapters by their names?

Second, does your app allow people to see and select audiobook chapters by their chapter artwork?

Third, does your app allow people to see the chapter artwork of whatever chapter is playing? If so, how large is the display of this artwork?

In regard to your comment on scrub bars for audiobooks, we all agree they don't work when you're scrubbing within the whole book, but I've gotten the impression that people used to be able to scrub within the current chapter. This is certainly not the only way of doing it, but your comment seems to entirely overlook this option.

Best wishes.

Hi daniel-nb,

1) Yes, you can select chapters by name.

2) No, with the version currently available, artwork is for the whole audiobook. However, I am actively updating Bookmobile, and will be adding artwork-by-chapter in the next release or one following, which means as early as late next week, or as late as a month away (I don't have control over the App Store approval times).

3) There are two modes to the main display. One shows the jump buttons, and the cover image is very small inside of the play/pause button. The other mode shows the cover sized up to the width of the device. It's easier to show you than describe:

http://freshmowed.com/coverSwap.html

You can up/down swipe on the left of the screen to switch between these two modes.

There is a lot more wrong with scrub controls than just the size of the audio/video content or control.

If you have the time and environment where you can concentrate on the screen, scrub bars can work OK. They work great for some applications, but we're talking about audiobooks, where the environment is often your car or some other place where you can't or don't want to pick up your device and use fine motor skills.

Once you scrub, you've lost all context of where you were. You are most likely jumping ahead because you've already heard what you are hearing now. So you jump ahead, and decide if you want to jump further forward, or backward some. Those are discrete operations and separate mental processes working in a feedback loop that could last many seconds. With scrubbing, you've added in an analog control requiring you to exercise precise movements, with no "memory" provided by the application to guide you.

Thanks for the questions!

-Duke