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Topic: foobar2000 as Audiobook player (Read 455 times) previous topic - next topic
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foobar2000 as Audiobook player

Has foobar been tested listening to audio books?

There are two requirements for an audiobook player: 1. Speed control (up to 3x speed, which is good for lectures and slow speakers) 2. Remember the playing position within the file, even in the event of power failure (essential)

Things that are essential for music (equalizer and sonic enhancers like bbe sonic enhancer or the jet audio plugins) are not essential.  Neither is displaying the jpg like android book players.  But playback speed and remembering the playing place in the  11 hour file, even if the os crashes or I kill foobar.   I absolutely refuse to tolerate listening to any speech book or lecture at 1x speed, if I can help it.  2x is too slow for most lectures after you get accustomed to speeding up speech, but 2x is better than nothing. 

Also, I al

Re: foobar2000 as Audiobook player

Reply #1 –
1. Speed control: there is foo_dsp_effect. See this thread for a short discussion on how to make the speed control accessible in the GUI.

2. If you are contempt with a single saved state (not multiple simultaneous books), just enabling Preferences > Playback: Save playback state when closing foobar2000 and resume on next startup handles the normal case (closing fb2k gracefully). For powerloss or sudden process interruption, I don't have a good answer. There might be another component that automatically "bookmarks" the playback position (possible even per playlist). Together with a backup/restore component like foo_jesus, a powerloss-safe setup might be achievable.
 

Re: foobar2000 as Audiobook player

Reply #2 –
For speed there is foo_dsp_effect which includes "Playback rate shift" and "Tempo shift" DSPs. Only up to 2x. But to achieve 3x, you can use multiple instances of DSP in row.

There is option "Save playback state when closing foobar2000 and resume on next start up". But it will not work in case of power failure or killing foobar2000 with task manager. And there is bookmark functional in foo_skip to add bookmarks manually.

Re: foobar2000 as Audiobook player

Reply #3 –
A few days ago, I installed these suggestions. I am puzzled why these aren't built in, at least for an optional functional player, if much larger that is ready to music and books with what I would consider the bare basic functions (bookmark within each file, remembering place, eq, sonic enhancer, and visualizer which is useful for pc music playing if not so much playing on a phone in your pocket.  I think these are needed to attract new user, who are trying 5 other players and only have a glancing test of foobar before they move on to a new player.

I did just lose my place in a book, when I opened a new book to see if it was complete.  I haven't yet figured out how to bookmark my place in a track, although I was very pleased that it now remembers my place, and I recall the jesus one periodically save the state, so if something locks up or crashes, but haven't tried manually killing the app or forcing a reboot yet.