ShelfPlayer Reviews

The fact that ShelfPlayer requires a upfront purchase when it lacks core features its crazy, definitely a predatory pricing model. Maybe the UI is ever so slightly tidier than plappa, but the entire app is just slow as can be. When you first open ShelfPlayer it has to take a few seconds to cache the server, then a few seconds to cache the file you want to listen to. Plappa doesn’t do this. You open Plappa it instantly presents you your books, and can essentially instantly start playing whichever book you want. Plappa also works seamlessly with airplay, where this app continually struggles. this app was a complete waste of money, only reason anyone uses it is sunk cost fallacy at the 5% prettier UI.

Previous update finally solved the background crashing issue, but caused numerous other issues.

1. Trying to play a completed episode without first explicitly resetting progress causes an instant crash

2. If you have used the sleep timer, you must set to random value, then cancels, then set again. Otherwise it will show a negative number in the thousands and prevent podcasts from playing

3. The latest field has disappeared from CarPlay with no discernible way to get it back.

4. Double click AirPods no longer skips forward, but instead SKIPS TO THE NEXT EPISODE unlike every other audio app in existence. There seems to be no way to change this

5. The currently playing display at the bottom of the screen with occasionally stop working and require a force close

6. Occasionally will crash when queueing multiple episodes

To users - maybe just use plappa. It’s clunky and less pretty, but it actually works consistently

To the dev - maybe layoff the vibes. Random things are breaking and changing in every update. Kinda bums me out

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 ShelfPlayer Store). Just in the first week of use, I noticed a number of issues that really need to be addressed:

* Mysterious slowdowns that bring ShelfPlayer to a crawl such that force closing and restarting ShelfPlayer 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

I love ShelfPlayer . This is not a criticism but a bug. I think we need an option to load fully downloaded books without the need for the book trying to “handshake” the server I assume for keeping your place across different devices. Some times they fail to load until you turn off Wi-Fi. I’ve already got cellular data turned off to try and prevent this but the Wi-Fi will still cause it. We just need an option to say “I’m already downloaded I only use this device - I don’t need to talk to the server” so it loads immediately.

Happy to support this developer, but I ran in to consistent issues with ShelfPlayer . Local books frequently wouldn’t play, organization in ShelfPlayer is non-existent, and navigation of library is obtuse. I found myself having to stop ShelfPlayer frequently, and finally just went back to side loading the official app for ABS.

Not a bad app, and if you’re just trying to keep things local for trips without coverage it’s a reasonable option, but otherwise not a great ABS client.

ShelfPlayer is great - I have tried many audiobook apps, and this one is really good. The only problem is that it does not return any results from my audiobookshelf when filtering by genres. The little tag button is definitely populating from my genre list, but when you select one, there's no result.

This is really frustrating, because it's the most useful part of discovery. There should be the ability to sort by genre, since audiobookshelf doesn't populate tags.

This is a great app. I like the UI even more than the official ABS client in TestFlight. The only reason I still use the TestFlight and not ShelfPlayer is because I have my podcasts, audiobooks, and ebooks on AudioBookShelf, and the official client allows me to use all 3. If ebook support was brought to ShelfPlayer, I would almost definitely use it more.

This is a great player. Has everything now. I went to Plappa due to some preferences, but after this update I came back. Only issue is that bookmarks won’t work unless you kill ShelfPlayer . If you hit the bookmarks they continue with the current position. You have to kill ShelfPlayer to stop break current positioning, open back up, cancel request to proceed and then go to bookmarks. Nor enough for me go back to Plappa but it is frustrating. That fix would make this app a chefs kiss situation.

ShelfPlayer literally hits every note perfectly!

It’s tailor-made for a very specific niche use case: that being folks who run the Audio shelf self hosted audiobook software - but it does it so well that I now prefer it as my ex exclusive full-time way of listening to audiobooks! It’s that good! it’s worth every cent of its price and more. I can’t say enough good things. This is really outstanding work and I deeply appreciate all of the care the authors clearly lavished on this application! It really shows!

I’m really happy overall with this app as it manages my audiobooks via audiobookshelf running on my Linux server. The problem is, it occasionally starts the book from the beginning. This isn’t a huge deal for shorter books, but I’m listening to 1000+ page books over the course of weeks/months and it takes a long long time of skipping around in the audio book to find my place. Infuriating.


Edit: seems fixed

I use Audiobookshelf mostly for podcasts. I’ve tried all of the Audiobookshelf apps (to date there are 5 including this one) and I stuck with the beta official app because it was the least worse. Well this app actually feels like something in the same league as overcast, pocket cast, etc. I’m very impressed and happy. The only feature i need is the ability to add a new podcast without having to open up the mobile browser, but I suspect that’s a limitation of the API.

There are now several great options for listening to audiobooks from an Audiobookshelf server on iOS. this app is my favorite by a lot. The design is great, and it’s ridiculously full featured. For example it’s the only app I’ve found that can add books to Collections, something I’d previously only been able to do on the browser version of Audiobookshelf. Quick tip: ShelfPlayer can be extensively customized. Many of its more fiddly settings are in the Settings app rather than directly in the this app app, which I like.
I run ShelfPlayer on iPhone, iPad, and occasionally even on my Mac (as an iPad app) and it’s a great tool on all of them.
Many thanks to this awesome developer for a polished and beautiful app.

I had been using my app in offline mode while fixing my server was on the back burner and the lastest update removed everything so I lost all my progress from offline mode and I can't figure out why ShelfPlayer isn't connecting anymore. I still love ShelfPlayer so much and would recommend it to anyone using audiobookshelf. This is my only bad experience and just want the devs to be aware of it.

I was struggling to find a good play to use my local Audiobookshelf on and it was between the beta yea app and this. ShelfPlayer was definitely prettier but lacked a ton of functionality so o never really used it…. Until the latest update. Oh my god thank you! This catapults it to one of the best podcast/audiobook apps you can use on iOS.

We now have playlists, a play queue!, I can edit my library from ShelfPlayer ?! So good. Five stars

Saw some people complaining that it’s $5. This price is absolutely worth it. It’s an open source app that is filling the gap left by another open source project. A one time payment to support this project is entirely reasonable.

ShelfPlayer integrates well into iOS and is regularly updated to improve the UX and maintain functionality with the backend that’s not directly under the maintainer’s control.

This by far the best audiobookshelf client I have used. It’s better than even the original audiobookshelf client which is in beta for more than a year now. If you want a real client for your audiobookshelf server this is ShelfPlayer to go. Shell out the $5 every penny with it. Thanks developer for making this, I’m glad I could payback for ShelfPlayer.

I’m at a period of life where reading books is difficult. I listen to books almost constantly. I have a half dozen audiobook apps and this one is my go to. I have multiple long series that I enjoy re-listening to, and this is a simple way to do that.

The only thing that would make ShelfPlayer 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.

I’m so impressed how well put together and smooth and full-featured ShelfPlayer is. It is easier to use and more stable and better integrated into iOS than Patreon or Stitcher or even Apple’s own podcast app. It’s working beautifully with my AudioBookShelf server and I couldn’t be happier with it. Amazing work!!

I have been a long time user/tester for the “official” ABS app and compared to it, this app is about 100 years ahead of it. Actual working Siri integration, a working CarPlay implementation, and just a clean easy to navigate UI.

Spend the few bucks, you will never look back!