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Topic: Checklist for audio book listening using Foobar2000 (Read 314 times) previous topic - next topic
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Checklist for audio book listening using Foobar2000

Obviously, audio books are huge, with Audible. 

However, if you want higher quality books to listen to, you need a good android player with:

     1. Ability to remember my place in the book after any sudden power failure or reboot of the phone. (After changing gears and forgetting about the book for a few weeks, and reboots, resume is essential.)
     2. Navigation BUTTONS!.  Easy seconds, minutes and hour jumping in a 38 hour file to relisten or find place where someone started talking to you.  Essential.
     3. Ability to spider and play tracks and books in the right order as they exist on the device.

    There are other non essential, but still important  check list items:
      1. Bookmarking.
       2. Playback at greater than 1x.  I usually use 1.2 x for audio books that are good, and 1.7 x for audio books that are otherwise boring.   If I am trying to get through things really fast, I playback up to 2.7 speed, and can follow along just fine.  Sometimes, 3.25 speed.
     3. Ability to click, delete finished files--a one click flush.  I personally don't like auto delete finish files.  Also, starred files or folders should be immune from the flush.

    Less important things, that have value, are:
    1. EQ. balance, any filter or boost to help playback quality with sub par input files.
    2. Real time bit rate stats to see how efficient a vbr is at dropping to 8kps during silence.   Plus the property bit rate stat, as averaged for the entire file.
    3.  A drag and drop playlist editior and saver.
    4. Playing with full screen visualizations that draw art according to the music for relaxing on the bed.
    5. Tagging, transcoding, playing from dropbox, google drive, idrive, microsoft one drive. etc.


As you can see, foobar2000, as matured it has become since I first tried it in like 2001, still has huge problems that would make listening to audio books functionally impossible, because if I loose my place in books or long files, and cannot navigate with buttons I can click to bump forward and backward, I will abandon the attempt at listening to books.  I might get through a book here or there, but seldom in the real world.

When you read someone request navigation buttons, it only means one thing: they are trying to play speech recordings of scores or even hundreds of hours!  You don't ask for these things listening to music.

I don't think foobar2000 can compete with the plugins of jet audio, anyway.  bbe sonic enhancer and jet's clarifier, are untouchable, I think.   But I do think, a few under the hood improvements, and you could have a good audio player.  (I am using it on the desktop for the convert and listening to fdk and exhale aac before putting the books onto my android, to supplement audible.)