Hi Jürgen, Nic, Brett, and Other iOS Audiobook listeners, While the problem of audiobooks lacking chapter organization in the iOS 7 music app remains, the Bookmark app, which makes it easy to set multiple custom bookmarks and notes, and also to navigate through large time intervals with a time ribbon slider, has reappeared in the App Store, and is free today. I was going to suggest this as a way to get around having to scrub through the entire book if you lose your place when the first posts about this problem appeared in September, but this app has not been available for a few months, and the original support web site pages have also been offline. The Bookmark app reappeared in the app store today, and is currently free. Although it hasn't been updated in quite a while, it still works.
Here's the App Store URL: • Bookmark (used to be $2.99, now free) by Dockmarket LLC https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bookmark/id326290323?mt=8 There are a few caveats: the entries on the Settings & Info screen for the Tutorial, FAQ, and Settings point to the web site, and so will not work. This app was a labor of love by someone who worked in a different area, but wanted an audiobook listening app for his own purposes early on. He completely rewrote the app a few years ago, and made the time ribbon slider for navigating through long audiobooks accessible to VoiceOver. I suspect that he doesn't have time to do the app development now, especially with the iOS 7 changes, but likely the current issue with chapter navigation in iOS7 with iTunes 11 still being unresolved may have prompted the return of this app (without a fee). If this is the case, you may not get much support for dealing with audiobook problems that Apple itself hasn't fixed. I'm just glad that they brought the app back, even though I already had a copy. Since it works through files in your iTunes library and the music app, it will work with all authorized audiobook formats: ones without DRM that you created through third party applications, audiobooks purchased through the iTunes Store, and Audible audiobooks. And while it won't keep track of chapter markers, you can set multiple bookmarks (and notes), and navigate easily with larger time intervals (that you can customize if you don't want the default intervals). It's also neat to use the sleep timer feature and set this up so that you can rock your phone to have it continue to play for youer customized additional time interval. I'll append copies I saved of the old tutorial and faq information, and also an excerpt from a viphone list post I made (before Mail Archiving was enabled for that group). • Bookmark Tutorial Getting Audiobooks Bookmark works with any audiobooks that are on the iPod app in your iPhone or iPod Touch. The simplest way to purchase audiobooks is through iTunes on your computer. Open iTunes and click on iTunes Store: Once in the store, click on “Audiobooks” at the top of the window: After you purchase one or more books and iTunes has downloaded them, they will appear in the “Books” section of your Library: To make sure the books are synced to your iPhone, connect your iPhone and click on the “Books” tab. Make sure “Sync Audiobooks” is checked: When you next sync your iPhone, the new audiobook(s) will be ready to go in Bookmark! Other options: You may purchase audiobooks on your iPhone by starting the iTunes app and choosing “More”, then “Audiobooks”. You may also purchase from Audible which has options for monthly plans, or download free public-domain audiobooks from sites like Librivox. Getting Podcasts Bookmark works with all podcasts synced to your iPhone or iPod Touch from iTunes. To subscribe to podcasts, click on “Podcasts” in iTunes, then click “Podcast Directory” in the lower right of the window. Make sure “Sync Podcasts” is selected on the “Podcasts” tab of your iPhone or iPod Touch. After syncing, the tracks will be available in Bookmark. Bookmarks and Notes To create a bookmark anywhere in the book, just press the “Bookmark” button. You can customize the title by tapping in the top title field. To add or edit notes, tap in the lower section. After you tap “Save”, the bookmark will now be available by clicking on “Bookmarks” in the upper-right of the window. The bookmarks window lets you quickly listen to any bookmarks by clicking on a row. You may edit the bookmark or view notes by tapping the blue arrow on the right. To delete a bookmark, either tap “Delete” after tapping the title of the bookmark, or just swipe your finger from left-to-right over the bookmark and tap “Delete”. Sharing and Exporting To share your bookmarks and notes with others or export it for yourself, tap the “More” button, then “Email bookmarks”. A text summary of every bookmark and note will be formatted for emailing. Unfortunately, it is not technically possible at this time to save the audio of a bookmark for sharing. Bookmark FAQ • How do I get books in the Music section to show up in Bookmark? Tracks need to be moved into Books in order to be picked up by Bookmark. It just takes a few steps. See this post for more info: How To Move Tracks to Books • What devices and OS Versions are supported? Bookmark will run on any generation iPhone or iPod Touch. The app requires OS version 3.1 or higher and one or more audio tracks in the Books or Podcasts category in iTunes synced to the device. • What file formats are supported? Any audio tracks that will play in the iPod will play in Bookmark, including Audible, AAC, .m4b, .m4a, and .mp3. This includes Audiobooks and Podcasts. • What is the maximum supported file size? Audible books of any size are supported. .m4a/m4b files should be under 320MB to play reliably. Files larger than that may report a false length that causes Bookmark to not be able to navigate forward or backward. This limitation is also seen in the iPod app itself. If a given track is not easy to navigate in Bookmark (i.e., you can’t fast forward), you will find the same problem in the iPod/Music app. The ultimate cause of the problem is unknown but it’s been noted on several forums. The 320MB limit isn’t a hard-and-fast number, but it appears to be safe. You may find success with larger file sizes, but just be aware in case run into problems. • What do I do if Bookmark crashes or is running slowly? Please do the following: First, please make sure you are on the latest version of Bookmark. Upgrades are always free and you can check by opening the App Store app and looking for Bookmark under the Updates tab. If an update is available, please install it. You may also want do a full reboot of the phone. Hold down the button on top of the phone until you see “slide to power off”. Slide the red button right and the phone will shut down. Press the button again to restart it. Open Bookmarks and try again. The iPod app can take up too much memory even when it’s not playing and in rare instances can cause Bookmark to crash when starting. Contact support at [email protected] if none of these work. • Do the bookmarks stay with the audiobook file so I could use them in other players? Unfortunately no, the bookmarks won’t stay with the file itself. There are limitations with what Bookmark or any app can do with music files – they can list the library contents, determine where in a music file is being played, the name, the album art, etc., but they cannot modify the music file itself. • Do bookmarks disappear when I unsync a book? Bookmarks remain stored so if you re-sync a book the bookmarks will reappear. • What is backgrounding? Backgrounding means you can start listening to a book in Bookmark then exit the app to use another app like SMS or email while still listening to the book in the background. When you restart Bookmark, it will continue playing from the current point. • Does Bookmark work with podcasts? Yes, as of version 1.2 any podcast in the iPod is available for playback in Bookmark. • Does Bookmark support double-speed listening? Yes, although indirectly. Non-Apple apps like Bookmark cannot control the playback speed of iPod tracks, but to enable 1/2X or 2X listening, just open an audiobook in the iPod (or Music app on the iPod Touch) and set the speed as seen in the screenshot below. Bookmark will play audiobooks at the speed set here. • Are chapter listings available? No. Apple doesn’t provide access to chapter into to apps like Bookmark. If they ever add this ability, we will add it to Bookmark. This post has more info: Note on Chapters • Can I access books downloaded via the Audible app? No. Each app is its own “walled garden” and Apple doesn’t allow one app to access the files of another app. The Audible app downloads books into its private storage, not the iPod, so Bookmark is not able to access them. You can use Audible books with Bookmark by downloading them into iTunes from audible.com on your computer, then syncing your iPhone or iPod Touch. Excerpt from my viphone post January 20, 2012: Subject: Re: BookMark App Hi Rick, Ricardo, Jeremy, and Others, Since the original poster wanted to know the advantages of using the BookMark app, and very little of the ensuing discussion focused on that question, apart from a few of Rick's comments, I'll try to address those points, and present this in a context free of the iPhone 4S Siri discussion or a discussion of how to set up tracks in iTunes so that playing resumes from the last played position (e.g. support of bookmarking). The Bookmark app was designed to provide features for audiobook readers that are either not available or not easily used through the regular iTunes music app. This includes features like maintaining multiple bookmark locations for an audiobook with optional custom labels, and keeping notes for bookmark entries. This also includes the ability to navigate easily backwards and forwards through tracks with different time intervals such as 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, and 30 minutes. This feature is accessible, and fairly intuitive to use: there's a "time ribbon slider" in the center of the screen that lets you advance from your position by moving to the right (with audible clicks at the intervals I listed), or move backwards from the present position by moving to the left (with the same audible clicks for these intervals). This was meant to provide better support for people who want more flexible navigation for browsing or moving more precisely through large files than trying to use the slider in the iPod or music app. And of course, since you have easy access to multiple bookmarks you may have set ("bookmarks" button in top right corner of the screen of your currently playing audiobook), you can also easily navigate from any of these positions, that are stored sequentially by creation date (and which can be relabeled with a different title of your choice). There are lots of configurable options: you can choose to set a quick bookmark by shaking the device. Or you could set this up so that when the device is shaken you go to play/pause mode or jump back 15 seconds. You can customize your time ribbon slider time step intervals. You can change the default bookmark title to give you numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) instead of date and time stamps, or leave this heading blank if you always insert bookmark note descriptions. I think by default the "Autoplay last track" switch is set to on, so that when you launch the Bookmark app you immediately resume playing the last items you were listening to. You can turn this off if you want to browse your library and make a specific selection instead. Since a lot of people listen to audiobooks before going to sleep, but don't want to lose track of their positions, there's a sleep timer setting to turn off the app. And yes, you could tell Siri to do this, but as Rick mentioned, one of the neat features is that you can set this up to automatically extend the timer by another 10 minutes using a setting where you "rock" the iPhone to the side. So If you're awake and want another 10 minutes, you can just tilt your iPhone to the side and let it keep on reading, without any need to say anything and perhaps disturb the person who is trying to sleep beside you. The Bookmark app also extends these features to podcast listening, as well. I first posted about the Bookmark app nearly a year ago, in part of a discussion about how to easily navigate through podcasts in the default iPod or Music app. At the time, the time ribbon slider was not accessible to VoiceOver, although the other features worked, and the developer was just engaged in re-writing a major version update to implement podcast listening and also to re-work the interface. (This was before many of us started using apps like Podcaster, iCatcher, and Downcast for specialized podcast listening, and when Podcaster still had a more limited feature set.) Well, in response to inputs, the new version of Bookmark was made accessible with VoiceOver, and podcast listening, and a number of other features were also introduced. So here are some more of the limitations/features of the app. Speed control is basically implemented by setting the listening speed in the regular iPod or Music app, and then will be applied to tracks that you listen to in the Bookmark app. This means that other speed settings that you might get from your podcast app won't be available -- you can set listening to 2 times speed, but not faster. Tracks that you download or stream from podcasting apps or from the Audible app won't be available to the Bookmark app because of Apple's policy of sandboxing applications. You can only work with what is synced in your iTunes library to your device. However, what that means is that all your audiobooks -- whether ripped from CDs and imported into your iTunes library, purchased from the iTunes Store, or purchased from Audible and loaded onto your device, are all available in one place. There's also supposed to be a feature in settings to "extend" the definition of audiobooks to search for items in your music library that are tagged with genre labels of "audiobook" or "speech". (I haven't used this.) And in Windows iTunes systems you should be able to play WMA audiobooks, although I hear there's currently a bug in the iOS 5 implementation of this. The bookmarks and notes set in this app only exist when you access these tracks through the Bookmark app. Overall, I think this is a good app, for people who want the features of multiple bookmarks, better browsing, and consolidated listening. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Sep 30, 2013, at 3:19 AM, Jürgen Fleger wrote: > Hello Esther, > thanks for the great news. I suppose it will be fixed soon if there is such a > big discussion about this topic. :-) > And thank you very much for the hint about Audiobooks Player. I might give it > a try. > All the best > Jürgen > > Am 30.09.2013 um 10:55 schrieb Esther: > >> Hello Jürgen, >> There's a very long discussion thread about this issue over at the Apple >> Discussions forum, with many people who are unhappy about the failure of >> chapter organization for playing Audiobooks in the music app in iOS 7. The >> only alternative that seems to be workable is to use a third party app named >> "Audiobooks Player" ($4.99) by Mario Adrian: >> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audiobooks-player/id660933412?mt=8 >> >> Since this costs $4.99, I wasn't inclined to try it out for accessibility, >> and in any case I don't feel that we should have to purchase another app to >> fix the problem that arose in the music app in iOS 7. The poster stated he >> was using it successfully on both an iPhone 5 and an iPad mini. This was >> confirmed by another user who had used software to construct audiobooks with >> chapter organization. Apparently, you can also authorize the app to play >> audiobooks with DRM (such as Audible, or purchases from the iTunes Store) if >> you go into the app's settings, but one of the posters stated that the app >> crashed the first time he tried to launch it for playing an Audible >> audiobook. (I would just use the Audible app for that.) >> >> Just thought I would report in the results of further investigation on this >> topic. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Esther >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
