🎧 New Audiobookshelf-Powered Web Player for Your Audiobooks

Hey guys, Lucas here 👋

I just wanted to share a quick showcase of the newest feature I added to Read-To-Me: a built-in audiobook player.

As you might know, Read-To-Me outputs your audiobooks as M4B files (though it also outputs standard MP3s). M4B is a great format because it natively supports embedded chapters. Read-To-Me automatically adds these chapters to your audiobook based on your input file's content, which makes navigating long documents way easier.

The downside is that to actually use those chapters, you usually have to download the file and find a dedicated third-party app to play it. I wanted to fix that and make listening a bit more straightforward.

Now, when your audiobook is ready, you'll see a simple "Play" button right next to the download options. Clicking it takes you straight to a dedicated audiobook player right in your browser—no downloads or extra software required.

Here's a quick rundown of what it does:

Full chapter support: It automatically pulls in the chapters Read-To-Me generated from your document, so you can open the menu and easily jump around the table of contents.
Standard playback controls: You can adjust the playback speed and skip forward or backward.
Resumes where you left off: If you close the tab or hit pause, the player remembers your progress. The next time you open the link on that device, it will resume right from the exact second you stopped.

The player itself is based on Audiobookshelf, which is an awesome open-source audiobook server. Definitely check them out if you're into self-hosting.

That's pretty much it for this update - just a small quality-of-life feature so you can get straight to listening.

See you next time!