Listen Audiobook Player

Review by eFreeware

Phone audiobook listening has an awkward gap in it. This app is aimed at listeners whose library comes from somewhere other than a subscription catalog: a pile of DRM-free files, a folder on a server, or a public-domain download. General-purpose music players treat a twelve-hour novel as one long track, and the result is a listening experience that fights you at every pause.

Listen Audiobook Player is one answer to that problem. It comes from acme-android.com, has been sold on Google Play since July 2012, and is priced at $1.99 as a single purchase. It is a feature-rich player for audiobooks, with format support, folder libraries, playback tuning, bookmarks and syncing. It has a 4.4 average from 5,476 ratings and more than 100,000 installs, which for a paid niche utility is a healthy signal that it does what it promises.

What follows is a look at who this suits, what each part of it does, what the $1.99 actually covers, and how it compares with the alternatives you might weigh against it.

Who this player is built for

The core audience here is anyone whose audiobooks are files rather than streams. The app is designed to play content the user provides, and the developer points to sources of DRM-free audio such as Librivox, Libro.fm, Downpour and Loyal Books, along with any other place that supplies unprotected files. If your library lives in a folder structure you control, this is the shape of app that fits it.

That includes people who rip or buy their own books, people who collect public-domain recordings, and people who keep a library on a home server. The developer has built in Plex and Audiobookshelf integration so books can be pulled from a hosted server straight into the local library, and Audiobookshelf users also get sync. That is a fairly specific set of listeners, but it is a set that tends to be underserved.

It also suits listeners who care about how a book sounds rather than just whether it plays. The app offers a long list of playback adjustments, and the ability to set global defaults with per-book overrides means you can tune one difficult narrator without disturbing the settings that work for everything else.

If your audiobooks arrive through a subscription app with its own player, there is little here for you, since the app is built around files you supply yourself. The rest of this review is aimed at readers who already have those files, or expect to.

Format support and the folder library

The app handles mp3, m4b, m4a, opus, ogg, aac, flac and more, with the standing condition that files must be DRM free. Embedded chapters are supported for most audio codecs, which matters for anyone with properly authored m4b files, since chapter navigation is the difference between a usable audiobook and a single long recording.

Your audiobook folder is the library, and the app keeps up with it on its own. The developer's guidance is that each book should sit in its own folder, and books can also be organized inside subfolders. You can browse by folder or switch to a flat list of everything at once, and a search button finds a title quickly when the collection grows.

There is also a curated catalog of Librivox titles available to download from inside the app, including classics such as The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Around the World in Eighty Days, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein and Meditations, plus religious texts including the Old and New Testaments, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita. For a new user with an empty library, that is a reasonable place to start listening on day one.

Playback controls that go well past play and pause

Playback speed runs from 0.5x to 6x, and alongside it the app offers silence trimming, pitch control, volume boost, background noise reduction, volume leveling, an equalizer and balance. Global defaults can be set, with per-book overrides where a particular recording needs different treatment. That combination covers the common complaints about older recordings: uneven volume between chapters, hiss in the background, and a narrator who reads either too slowly or too quickly for your taste.

Navigation is handled with custom short and long skip times, auto rewind based on how long you have been paused, and a sleep timer with shake to reset, custom notification sounds and a few other options. A book play queue lets you line up what comes next, and the app can remember your last played volume.

Bookmarks are more developed than the usual single flag. You can view and search bookmarks across all books in one place, and create an audio clip from a bookmark that can be saved or shared. A position history rounds out the record of where you have been in a book.

Cover art is taken from embedded art, from images sitting in the book folder, or downloaded from within the app, which saves the usual manual artwork hunt. The app also offers to convert books to Opus format, which the developer says produces much smaller files with minimal change to sound quality.

Listening across devices and in the car

Sync is built in, covering current position and bookmarks across multiple devices, so a book can be picked up on a tablet where the phone left off. Audiobookshelf users get sync through that integration as well. For anyone who listens on more than one device, this is the feature that decides whether a player is tolerable or not.

Android Auto is supported, along with widgets, lock-screen controls and Bluetooth play, pause and skip. Headset buttons can be assigned user-defined actions from a single click up to six, which is the kind of detail that matters when your phone is in a pocket and you want to move back thirty seconds without looking.

The app can also be controlled from automation tools such as Tasker and Llama, with a published list of available actions. Recent updates added a restart intent that rewinds the current book to the beginning and a bookmark automation intent that can set a custom title, alongside improved Audiobookshelf server setup with Cloudflare Access authentication support.

The interface is localized into dozens of languages, and the most recent release was updated for Android 16 compatibility, along with fixes for chapter volume, the sleep timer when Bluetooth is in use, Plex sign-in, library loading and the buttons on the home screen widget.

What the $1.99 covers

Listen Audiobook Player costs $1.99 as a one-time purchase. There are no advertisements and no in-app purchases to unlock features. Everything described in this review is part of the app you buy, not a tier you upgrade into later.

The developer offers a seven-day refund policy on top of Google's automatic two-hour window. If you want the longer period, you email the order number from your purchase receipt. Support is handled by email as well, and the developer asks to be contacted with questions or problems.

For a paid app, the update history is the thing to watch, and the release notes suggest it is still being worked on: Android 16 compatibility, server integration improvements and bug fixes are all recent. The app carries a content rating of Everyone 10+.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious comparison is a general music player. Most of them will play an audiobook file, and some handle chapters, but the folder-based library, the bookmark tools, the sleep timer and the position sync are the sort of thing a dedicated audiobook player provides. If you listen to books regularly, the difference is not cosmetic.

A subscription audiobook service is the other alternative. It comes with a catalog, a player and syncing included, and for many listeners that is the easier path. What it does not do is play the files you already own or the DRM-free recordings you can download for nothing. Those are different libraries, and the choice between them is really a choice about where your books come from.

A third option is a free player. Those exist and some are capable. This app sits in the middle: paid, but with a defined feature set, a refund window and a support address, and with server integrations for Plex and Audiobookshelf that a home-library user will appreciate.

A worthwhile purchase for listeners with their own files

Listen Audiobook Player does one job and does it in detail. It plays DRM-free audiobooks from your own folders, gives you fine control over how they sound and how you move through them, keeps your place across devices, and works in the car. The $1.99 is a single payment with no ads and no feature unlocks, and the app has been updated recently enough to run on current Android versions.

It is best suited to listeners who already own audiobook files, download public-domain recordings, or keep a library on a Plex or Audiobookshelf server. Those users will get the most out of the format support, the folder library and the sync.

If you have a folder of books waiting for a proper player, this is a straightforward purchase to consider, and the refund policy gives you a week to decide whether the way it organizes and plays your library matches how you listen.

What's new

• Updated for Android 16 (SDK 36) compatibility. • The bookmark automation intent can now set a custom bookmark title. • Added a RESTART automation intent to rewind the current audiobook to the beginning. • Audiobookshelf: improved server setup and added Cloudflare Access authentication support. • Bug fixes: corrected chapter volume, sleep timer interaction with Bluetooth, Plex sign-in library loading, and home screen widget buttons.