Audiobooks on your device

How Mediagg finds the books on your phone, how to add a folder of them, and how a book is laid out.

Audiobooks is a chip of its own in Local media, beside Songs and Videos. Each book is one cover, however many files it is — a book of fifty MP3s and a book in a single .m4b both appear once.

How a book is found

Nothing has to be tagged. A book is found by where it is kept:

• Anything in a folder called Audiobooks. Every folder inside it is one book.
• Any .m4b file. On its own it is a book by itself.
• Anything the phone itself has marked as an audiobook.
• Anything in a folder you have added as a folder of books — see below.

The files of a book are its chapters, played in order, and disc folders such as CD1 and CD2 stay part of the book they are in.

An empty chip says the same: No audiobooks yet. Add the folder your books are in — each folder inside it is one book — or keep them in a folder called Audiobooks.

Adding a folder of books

Books kept somewhere else — a folder called My Books, say — are added with the plus in the toolbar, Add an audiobooks folder. Choose the folder your books are in, not a book: every folder inside it becomes one book.

The first time, Mediagg explains that rule before the folder picker opens, under Adding audiobooks. Tick Don't show this again and the plus goes straight to the picker from then on.

A folder called Audiobooks never needs adding. It is read wherever it is.

Finding a book

The chip sorts like every other — As listed, Name, Date added, Length and Size — and has a filter beside the sort, for how far through each book you are:

Both are remembered. The covers say the same at a glance: a bar along the bottom of a book you are part-way through, and a tick on one you have finished.

A book's own screen

Open a book and it lists its chapters, not its files. Each row is numbered, named, and shows where in the whole book it starts; tap one to play the book from there. The chapter playing now is marked, and the mark moves as the book does.

A book whose files carry no chapter marks of their own lists each file as a chapter, under its own name — so every book reads the same way, whatever it was cut into.

The line under the title says what the book holds: 50 chapters · 3 parts for three files holding fifty chapters between them, or simply the chapters where the files and the chapters are one and the same.

Resume appears in place of Play once you have started a book, and carries on from where you got to — in whichever file that was.

A book's chapters are kept once they have been read, so a book opens on its chapter list straight away, the next time and after the app has been closed.

Books and your songs

Books are kept out of Songs, so a thirty-hour book does not turn up among your music. On Android, Audiobooks in Songs in Scanning lists them there as well — They are always under Audiobooks; this lists them among your songs too.

For what the player does with a book — the whole-book position bar, chapter-by-chapter skipping, bookmarks and a speed of its own — see Listening to a book.