Big Finish Audiobook Player Reviews

by Chazzemel

Disappointed that this new app requires IOS 16 or higher. I have an iPod Touch that I use to listen to Big Finish and Audible audiobooks and to iTunes so my iPhone storage isn’t filled.

by Ewen's Mom

I listen to these audiobooks during my commute to work. And this new app is garbage. It takes 10 minutes to download a story that took the old app 10 seconds to download. But most fatally it doesn’t do apple carplay which is how I listen to these. Now I have over 500 things I haven’t yet listened to and can’t access them. I’m having significant Big Finish regret right now.

Addendum, as I try and use this more it just becomes more and more evident how unusable it is and how little thought went into serving the customer as opposed to BigFinishAudiobookPlayer maker. BigFinishAudiobookPlayer is a useless piece of feces that never should have seen the light of day. I wish I could give it -10 stars. It didn’t earn the 1 that was the lowest rating possible.

by Sz0rdrin

Wow this new app is complete trash! You build a login prompt that does NOT let me fill in the credentials from a password manager, you block the ability to use the paste function to manually populate the credential fields forcing me to type it by hand. Ok… so I do that with my complex 24 character password and it fails saying it doesn’t match. Alright… I check it character by character 4 times and yep it’s entered correctly. So I try my credential on the website which works fine! This tells me you’ve set some sort of character limit on your password prompt evaluation in BigFinishAudiobookPlayer . In this day and age of everything getting hacked NO I’m not doing to redo my password to something shorter to fit whatever nonsense BigFinishAudiobookPlayer is expecting. I have a large library of content I’ve collected over the years but I refuse to spend another dime on Big Finish until this garbage gets fixed.

by Drjohnsmith

For reasons that appear somewhat mystifying, Big Finish has abandoned their old, nearly perfect app, in favor of this new app, which has none of the functionality of the old. Their old app had CarPlay; this one does not. Their old app had the ability to search by range or series; this one does not. The new app limits the number of search results that can be shown at one time – so if you search alphabetically (one of your only options with BigFinishAudiobookPlayer), you’ll only see results from A to D, for example.

Nothing about this makes any sense, so I can only assume there was some sort of financial or nepotistic motivation for making this change. With any luck, these issues will be addressed in future updates and BigFinishAudiobookPlayer will return to being what it was. For now, you’re probably better off downloading these from the website and uploading them to your phone rather than using BigFinishAudiobookPlayer.

by Eear

More than half the stuff I click “download” but it doesn’t download it to BigFinishAudiobookPlayer . The little x with the circle around it appears, but there reached a point where nothing was downloading. Since yesterday I’ve been waiting for this stuff to download, and in case it comes up I do have download using data turned on.
Also, the items that have downloaded I’m only able to create a playlist of 1 track. I’ll create the playlist but only the first audio drama I add appears in the playlist.
Also, I’m only seeing a small fraction of my purchases when I scroll. All the others I have to search to find. Even things which have been downloaded I still have to search because they aren’t visible when I scroll.

I appreciate these are things that either will be fixed or things I’m doing wrong but still, it would’ve been nice for a fully functioning app to be released *before* the old one was let go.

by Bcjsundance

There are zero improvements to BigFinishAudiobookPlayer over the old one. You can’t search by the actors name. Which means you can’t find everything with the fourth doctor, for example. Every time I open it, it forgets all of the preferences I set up the last time I had it open. For example, I have to select display by release date again. There’s no way to tell if a book is currently available or not once you purchase it. You have to click on it to see that will be released at the end of whatever month. Then on top of all of these problems, it takes forever to download anything, and sometimes it says it’s downloaded and it isn’t. BigFinishAudiobookPlayer makes me want to stop purchasing things from Big Finish. I love their Doctor Who audio plays. However, if there is no way to listen to them easily, what’s the point? I don’t even know what’s out these days. The current releases aren’t even displayed on the website anymore. All in all I may be done with Big finish.

by Sfjoshtopia

Unlike the old app, you can’t sort by doctor, companion, or anything that makes it easy to find the stories you’re looking for or sort to easily put together playlists. A downgrade in every way from the previous app

by Nerdteller

I downloaded most of my library but I can’t browse all of them. BigFinishAudiobookPlayer only lets me scroll so far which means I can’t see most of my library. Also I keep changing the way BigFinishAudiobookPlayer sorts titles but it keeps reverting every time I close BigFinishAudiobookPlayer . Please fix this!!!

by Aj5598

Ok so I am able to login to app but the problem I’m having is that every time I open it it sends me directly to my settings for it. But most importantly I can’t access all of the audios I bought!! I only can access a few where is the rest of my library??

by Lzw2

So disappointed that these updates are not making noticeable improvements. Used to listen to stories daily. Now if I can download story, it disappears the next day. I want to be able to listen, but BigFinishAudiobookPlayer is still ruining the experience.

by DoctorWhoasaur

App doesn’t show more than 30 of your purchases. It literally forces you to use the search bar for anything not shown in that list of 30, but the search bar doesn’t currently work either. Feels like they rushed the release to meet some arbitrary deadline and didn’t bother finishing quality control.

by LoneLocust

I’m sure this wasn’t Big Finish’s intention, but the experience of this new version of their app is so terrible, I won’t bother to buy more audios till this is completely overhauled.

No ability to use a password manager or even copy-and-paste your credentials was the first red flag even before I had signed in. Lack of CarPlay means that the experience in my car — where I listen to 95% of the audios — is not just worse, but more dangerous.

Then I find out you can only listen to one audio at a time, because if you switch from one story to another, you lose your place. Unconscionably bad design!

All of this can be fixed, but it should never have been released like this.

Big Finish, “We love stories, but apparently not audio players.”

by JiminysJournal

I only had a few gripes with the old app (skip intervals locked at 30s, instead of letting you use 15s ones, like in every other app; forced to download to listen; etc), but now they’ve removed so many features, like filtering by Range (or “Collection”).

CarPlay seems to also no longer be supported, and it would seem it’s not optimized for iPads, either.

As of launch day, several of my purchases don’t show up, unless I search. They’re also in a random order. This seems to be a known issue, though.

by HuskyJ

The ux is insanely bad. Like next level bad. I can’t even tell you how the experience is because I can’t even sign in. Most people these days use a password manager but there’s no way to use one with the sign in form because you can’t paste as the form decides to move modes every time you touch the password form. Also for some reason my password simply doesn’t work. Do not shut down the old app until you get some QA or maybe a half-competent UX designer on this one. I have a LOT of content in Big Finish and this new app is rendering it completely useless.

by Th3s3us

I don’t mind that they made a new app so much. But in the new app there is no filter function which was the best feature of the older version and on top of that there is no way to see more than thirty titles at a time. There are no pages you are limited to those thirty titles unless you change sort criteria which will show you a different thirty. The search function seems to be limited ie searching by a doctor doesn’t seem to be able to show all the titles associated to that doctor as it would under the filter function in the old app. I would like to see the return of the filter function and to be able to see all titles available.

by M Smith 47

It will not let me log in. It says my account is information is invalid, and I checked four time!!!

by Carol2343

I downloaded but was unable to log in and access my content. When I tried to retrieve my password the link is broken.

by ATimson

It’s ridiculous to start with that this is a new app instead of an update to the old one. On top of that, it doesn’t even support all the features of the old one. Most glaringly it’s missing CarPlay support.

by David Akers

Downloaded the new app, and tried to sign in. It would only tell me that the password is wrong, and link to reset my password takes me to somewhere that isn’t Big Finish. Looks very suspicious.

by Acschmit

Where to begin.... logging in is the most difficult of any app I have ever used. No long press paste. Had to manually enter credentials multiple times. Once I was in there was no way to tell which stories I already listened to. The old website let me hide the stories I listened to and BigFinishAudiobookPlayer would hide them. This is all gone. I have dozens os stories I haven't listened to and it appears BigFinishAudiobookPlayer makes you search for them from a list. Impossible. If Big Finish is trying to drive customers away they are doing a good job.

by Hekate1013

Just update the older app… why create a whole new one?

by JCZorkmid

Blocks paste in the password field so I’m done with this.

by Crochetowl

This was NOT made for the iPad, the screen size remains the same as on mobile which is a major negative (but at least offers landscape). I had mentioned on a review on the other app that having image display only (CD cover) would be wonderful and if you ever normalize the ipad display to fit the actual screen it would be amazing. I would like to have a tag showing whether I have listened to a title or not similar to what Kindle does. Also the sorting just feels clunky. It took me a few tries to get the sort I wanted. Basically this needed much more work before being deployed into production (as did the new website which is difficult to navigate) because right now, the previous website and app were far superior.

by I Poop A Hammer

I’ve used the same password for years with BF and this doesn’t even let you use it. Could have just updated the old app.

by Fergie1895

I have tried to sign it multiple times and it won’t let me.

by NEBJr

Won’t let me log in to my account.

by Jig77767

It’s all in the title of this review. The other quirks are minor and have been mentioned in other reviews. Poor roll out.

by VTChamp

This new app lacks the stability of the old version. The biggest loss of the new app is the lack of CarPlay—how can you remove this feature which is used a lot when commuting/traveling?

by M. Star

I don’t always purchase stories right when they are released, so sorting the stories by purchase date isn’t always helpful. I preorder or buy old stories on sale way after release. But when I use BigFinishAudiobookPlayer to sort by date released, all the future stories that haven’t even been released show up at the top, and I have to scroll down and then guess when I’ve reached the most recent release. There’s no way to tell without clicking on each story.

Also, I can’t see what’s been released, but not purchased. That was often how I knew if there was something I missed that I’d like to go buy. This doesn’t affect the use of BigFinishAudiobookPlayer , but I’m definitely going to be going to the website less without that.

And, stories aren’t downloading consistently. For example, the most recent purchase shows up on the list, but when I click on “download,” I just get a try again message.

by ScratchBtt

I lot of the reviews were prior to Tuesday’s access to App which was told in e-mails, notifications and their old website and app so I will give them credit about that.

Although BigFinishAudiobookPlayer is now functional, you are limited to viewing 30 items at one time which is down from the 100% complete catalog you own on the prior app. It is difficult to navigate and find what you are looking for.

The download feature is somehow worse than the prior app as it will download but it seems very picky if you download more than one at a time and will stop downloading after the first one completes.

Additionally, there is no Car Play feature which is a disappointment as I used it quite frequently on the older app.

Looks better. Definitely needs a whole lot of improvement before it even matches the functionality of the older app.

by Some Stars

All my purchased titles are now showing in BigFinishAudiobookPlayer since the update. But my playlists and wishlists are still gone. Haven’t tried CarPlay since the update. I also need the ability to sort playlists by release order. They are all out of order.

by Jessmac78

As others have said, BigFinishAudiobookPlayer is not as good as the old one, quite a few features were taken away and this new one feels more bare bones. As for the rollout, I know that snags are inevitable and I credit their team for working hard to rectify issues, but I noticed after updating BigFinishAudiobookPlayer that a bunch of my downloads had suddenly vanished. Most of them included “Part 1” freebies that I hadn’t even had a chance to listen to yet. I contacted their support team and hope they can shed some light on this. I’m glad I backed everything up to my desktop hard drive before the whole website revamp took place, but I prefer the convenience of listening to the stories via BigFinishAudiobookPlayer .

by Bree171717

Yesterday I had all of the UNIT titles today Aug 1 I have none. Yesterday I was missing only 10, today 19.