ShelfPlayer 4+

Super impressed & CarPlay works!

I downloaded this yesterday and am super impressed! It has a very nice looking interface that is both pleasant to look at and extremely functional. Though a relatively small thing, I particularly like the more books by author and more books in the series that show up under a a book. Also, I can’t over state how exciting it is to have real CarPlay support for books from Audiobookshelf. Add on that this app is truly open source and it’s pretty hard to beat. I highly recommend this app… and already have done so to friends.

Disappointing

I expected a lot more from a $5 app that is written to take advantage of the latest iOS features. While the interface generally looks nice, it is actually less user friendly and less functional than the first party Audiobookshelf app (beta is unfortunately full and it’s not yet on the App Store). Just in the first week of use, I noticed a number of issues that really need to be addressed:

* Mysterious slowdowns that bring the app to a crawl such that force closing and restarting the app was the only option (encountered while queuing multiple downloads)
* Mostly unusable search; searching anything other than author just doesn’t work (searches for title and other metadata just run indefinitely, never returning results)
* The interface, while pretty, is just not at all intuitively designed. Finding settings was difficult, for example

Developer Response ,

Hey,

there is some work being done to address these issues. ShelfPlayer's offline system has already been rewritten to offload work from the UI thread. There are many other useful changes coming.
But I hope you can appreciate that large updates like this take their time, and it won't be ready available next week.

The search functionality was broken due to me some breaking API changes from ABS, a fix will be released soon.

If you have any other UX ideas please send them to [email protected].
I can understand why you are not happy with the app, but pleas give it another try after the next update is released!

The Best Player for AudioBookshelf!

The only thing that would make this app even better would be adding Apple Watch support for offline listing when I don’t bring my phone with me. I’d gladly pay a few dollars more for the option of taking my books with me on my watch.