Edit: A couple times I’ve said eBook while I actually meant Audiobook. I’ve learned that Spotify has a 15 hour limit per month for their free ‘included in premium’ audiobooks. However these are the two books I listened to for free, and even rounding up to 13 hours it doesn’t make sense, unless they count accidental chapter skips which weren’t actually listened to. But it’s clear now that I know about the 15 hour limit, that they are not counting the time listening to paid audiobooks.
First book I listened to for free:
Second book I listened to for free:
OG post:
I purchased 3 eBooks in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy series (2 came free) and I’m on the final book. 20 minutes left in the last book and this is what Spotify tells me.
I’m over the edge now. I’ve been putting it off too long. I have a nice NUC I purchased about a year ago.
I’m tech inclined, 20 years of hobbyism, know the linux command line well. Work in IT consulting. But I’m busy. Very busy, and unmotivated to do things like hours of research and toying with settings getting things to work, if I ever have the time.
But this is the start of my new personal revolution.
I’ll read the wiki and have read about Sonarr, etc, and I also want movies and shows, but is there anything specifically for eBooks? Looks like Readarr is my best bet? Stripping the DRM of already purchased (and free with Spotify ‘Premium’) books to share on a seedbox is also something I’m willing to take requests on. Is there a way to rip from Spotify if you have a premium account? And what’s the best Android eBook reader (the last 3-4 I tried sucked with pirated eBooks)?
I know I’m sounding like a noob asking everything to be handed to me right now, but I am willing to put in the research and welcome and highly appreciate anyone with tips to point me in the right directions.
I didn’t really like readarr, it had a weird workflow and I find books to be different than series (they have longer release frequency, for example) so I’m getting them manually and importing into calibre for metadata. This way I can also check the quality of each epub because I hate finding that the book I’m going to read is badly formatted or has a weird encoding.
Lidarr can pull Spotify playlists or followed artists. Also have a look at the trash guides for setting up sonarr and radar, now there’s even a docker that auto co figures your sonarr and radar based off the latest trash guide settings
Whaaaaaat? It can? How does it work? Used to use the aur package spotify-ripper which was awesome, it used my creds and all that and pulled all the metadata from Spotify and it was awesome. I’d just cron it to run weekly against my likes playlist.
Others I’ve seen use Spotify but just pull the song file and nothing else. Does lidarr do a good job? I hate a messy metadata library.
Yeah it can import information from spotify then search for everything with your Downloader depending on if you torrent or usenet and you can set the quality that you want so it can keep upgrading your library over time as it finds better quality up to the max that you set
2"If we raise prices by 10 percent and make things a little bit shittier, we’ll lose 5 percent of our user base to pirating and the non-tech-savvy users left behind who don’t know how… Well they can just take another 10 percent up the ass next year! It’s win-win!"
They don’t, there were and potentially still are plans to add the ability to listen at CD quality, but it’s been almost 3 years since the announcement so I highly doubt it’s coming anymore. It also would’ve been 20 USD, at that price I would rather use Spotify premium for it’s playlist features and Qobuz for it’s fidelity for that price.
I’d maybe try youtube music, if google didn’t force it down my throat. But when I can’t uninstall it without rooting my phone. Or when I’ve got Spotify already setup, and then have to specify that I want to use it on my home devices. That’s just annoying.
Me: ok google! Bedroom lamps color red, bedroom lamps intensity 30% and play Diana Krall the look of love on the bedroom speakers
Google: Playing The Look of Love by Diana Krall from youtube music, but first listen to these ads before you get your freak on
Virtually every single song in the world in your pocket for a little over 10 euros a month doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me. Then again why does anyone use spotify for anything other than listening to music, there your guess is as good as mine.
I hate Spotify (I have to preface with this sentence)
But plenty of artists these days don’t bother releasing CDs and MP3s and you can legitimately only stream their songs.
I know small artists who were unable to send me the files of their own songs when I asked them. They just sent me a YouTube link and told me to listen there.
Oh, my apologies for being a mere mortal with a taste for mainstream mediocrity. Clearly, my lack of access to the obscure, avant-garde, underground artists you champion is a tragic oversight. I’ll just be over here enjoying my basic playlist, blissfully unaware of the elevated musical tastes reserved for the chosen few like yourself. Carry on enlightening us, oh connoisseur of the esoteric.
I saw some avant garde shit the other day, and there it was on spotify. Everyone is on spotify
Honestly, like… who isn’t on spotify? I think Metallica was holding out, but there on there now, and looks like Garth Brooks is also holding out. No one else I’ve ever looked up, including very small artists, were not on spotify.
How is it shitty in this case? That’s literally what OP bought, the right to listen to any book in Spotify’s catalog for free, for a certain number of hours. If they wanted to listen to a specific book unlimited they should have purchased that book directly.
They haven’t bought anything though. Or rather, they got exactly what they paid for, listening time.
I’m pretty sure this is a concept OP must’ve seen before, they can’t be that clueless. If you borrow a book from the library you don’t own it, and you have to be done with it by the time it’s due.
At this point I’m not sure if they’re just new to audiobooks or if they’re misrepresenting Spotify’s time-limited plans on purpose.
They bought one book, the others were free with time limit.
If Spotify misrepresented the free books or was unclear about what they represent then by all means, they should be called out. But it’s a bit different from what OP has complained about.
If you wanna selfhost your own solution, I can recommend Audiobookshelf. It scraps metadata from Apple, Amazon, Google etc, tracks on a per-user basis at what point in the book you are, can be used in a browser and has an android app. It’s easy to set up with Docker too. You can even add PDFs and epubs to the books.
Been using it for a few months and it has been great.
As for sourcing of audiobooks, aside from torrents there are also audiobb.com & audiobooksbee.com . They use RapidGator as host for a ddl.
Hey, thanks for the Audiobookshelf recommendation!
Recently I was looking for a audiobook player and Smart Audiobook Player was the best I found, but Audiobookshelf have almost all of the functions I liked like simultaneous dual timeline bar (one for the whole book and another for the current chapter), auto sleep, shake to reset sleep and so on. Just missed the small beep alert before the audio fade out on sleep.
Anyway, and all of this with the advantage of using my already selfhosted data, so no need to keep transferring files manually to the device. And all the progress are synced back to my homeserver, so I can use multiple devices without any problems.
This isn’t exactly what you asked for and might not even work, but look up xManager. It lets you install a modded version of Shittify with premium features on free accounts – maybe this limitation is something they also modded away?
The moment they tried to make me pay just to skip songs was the moment I downloaded xmanager. Haven’t gone back since. Absolutely ridiculous what Spotify thinks I will pay for.
Go to your local library and ask if they have audiobook borrowing through Libby or a similar platform! Not only are you NOT limited on listening hours, but it’s free! You just might have to wait if all the “copies” are borrowed at the moment.
Also, if you have a cool library like I do, you might be able to borrow from multiple libraries. For example, my library card is for the St. Louis County Library, but it can also be used at the St. Charles County Library. So if I am looking for an audiobook on Libby, and SLCL has 3 virtual copies and they are all borrowed, I can search SCCL to see if they have any. I’ve had many situations where I’ll find one library or the other will have a copy available for borrowing with no wait.
Just to piggyback on this comment… If you have a dope library like mine, you don’t even have to go in person to get your library card and do all of the above. I signed up for a card online, downloaded Libby, got everything set up and had an ebook checked out that same day.
If the experience that a paying customer gets is worse than the experience they get from pirating, then that’s the fault of the company selling that enshitified experience.
It’s wild how modern businesses are trying to kill themselves with every terrible idea they have to make more money.
I bought a few books off audible, and while I can still access them even without a subscription, I still have them converted to mp3 on my NAS, in case I ever lose access to audible for some reason.
Have you found a way to split those mp3s into several files by chapter etc.? All converters that I have tried so far just yield a single, several hours long mp3…
I use Voice audiobook player, that can do that, too. But when I switch devices, … it’s easier to pick up where I left, if it’s at least separated by chapters (or as some MP3 CDs do every 3-5 minutes a new track).
Also I do sometimes buy mp3 audiobooks for a blind friend who prefers to listen to them on a CD player (buttons can be felt and its easier to use than a touch screen). But a single, several hours long mp3 is bad in this scenario. And as i didnt find a tool to split them easily, Audible exclusives were out of the question…
As shitty as Amazon is, I will say that the books I’ve gotten through Audible are all still there and I can listen to them whenever I want even though I don’t have a subscription or anything anymore.
Audible replaced a version of a book my boyfriend bought with a completely different version of the same book. I mean a different narrator and everything. He had purchased the book a few years earlier but he didn’t manage to get a refund from them.
The Martian by Andy weir was my first experience of this. They re-recorded it with will wheaton and I “lost” my original with RC Bray. Though I will admit my version was part of the plus catalog, I still didn’t get a choice.
I’ve been enjoying LibroFM instead of Audible. Same subscription/credits per month model, but a portion goes to support a local bookstore of your choice. Feels way better to do that than give any extra money to Amazon.
You bought the audiobooks on Spotify, and then they limited your listening time? What the fuck? Do you have a subscription? DIdn’t even know they sold audiobooks; just thought they had some free ones.
Exactly. I pay for Spotify premium, I purchased 3/5 books in this series, and maybe it’s because 2 of the books were free with premium (incl this last book) that it’s time limiting me. But if that’s the case it’s also counting time listened during my paid-for eBooks. Absolutely crazy to me.
So it’s supposed to be 15 hours/month included with your premium subscription? Since I’m not familiar with how Spotify audio books work, I thought you meant that you had a free account and was allowed to listen 15 hours to books that would be included/unlimited with a premium subscription.
Contact support if it ate through your monthly credits faster that it should. If you’re a paying customer supports are usually quite helpful.
2 ebooks could easily be >15hours. OP sounds like a bullshitter to me. I don’t see how they could come to the conclusion that “its also counting time listened during my paid-for ebooks”. They could provide more info, but they arent. I think they just got mad that they couldnt finish the last 20 minutes of the book (understandably) and decided to flame spotify
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
English
I didn’t really like readarr, it had a weird workflow and I find books to be different than series (they have longer release frequency, for example) so I’m getting them manually and importing into calibre for metadata. This way I can also check the quality of each epub because I hate finding that the book I’m going to read is badly formatted or has a weird encoding.
Lidarr can pull Spotify playlists or followed artists. Also have a look at the trash guides for setting up sonarr and radar, now there’s even a docker that auto co figures your sonarr and radar based off the latest trash guide settings
Whaaaaaat? It can? How does it work? Used to use the aur package spotify-ripper which was awesome, it used my creds and all that and pulled all the metadata from Spotify and it was awesome. I’d just cron it to run weekly against my likes playlist.
Others I’ve seen use Spotify but just pull the song file and nothing else. Does lidarr do a good job? I hate a messy metadata library.
Yeah it can import information from spotify then search for everything with your Downloader depending on if you torrent or usenet and you can set the quality that you want so it can keep upgrading your library over time as it finds better quality up to the max that you set
So it uses torrents and not Spotify to download? That’s a downer.
easiest is to use the lidarr script with deemix, it automatically downloads everything.
1"Oh god! Some of our users are leaving because our service sucks now!"
2"Should we improve our service?"
3"Of course not! We should just make it more restrictive and raise prices!"
2"Yeah! Raise prices to make up for lost customers!"
1"yeah! no one will pirate anything if we just raise prices and make everything way more inconvenient!"
2"If we raise prices by 10 percent and make things a little bit shittier, we’ll lose 5 percent of our user base to pirating and the non-tech-savvy users left behind who don’t know how… Well they can just take another 10 percent up the ass next year! It’s win-win!"
I use the readera app on my android tablet. Haven’t had any problems with it yet.
What the fuck lmao
Why does anyone use shitify
Convenient, easy to use, available everywhere.
YouTube music clients?
Needs constant internet connection
Innertune can download music
Cool, let me know when youtube music starts using lossless audio.
Does Shittify ?
Apparently not, but Apple Music & Tidal do.
They don’t, there were and potentially still are plans to add the ability to listen at CD quality, but it’s been almost 3 years since the announcement so I highly doubt it’s coming anymore. It also would’ve been 20 USD, at that price I would rather use Spotify premium for it’s playlist features and Qobuz for it’s fidelity for that price.
I’d maybe try youtube music, if google didn’t force it down my throat. But when I can’t uninstall it without rooting my phone. Or when I’ve got Spotify already setup, and then have to specify that I want to use it on my home devices. That’s just annoying.
Me: ok google! Bedroom lamps color red, bedroom lamps intensity 30% and play Diana Krall the look of love on the bedroom speakers
Google: Playing The Look of Love by Diana Krall from youtube music, but first listen to these ads before you get your freak on
I love innertune
Me too but cache takes allot of space, if it gets over 5gb the app gets laggy and buggy
Virtually every single song in the world in your pocket for a little over 10 euros a month doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me. Then again why does anyone use spotify for anything other than listening to music, there your guess is as good as mine.
Some currently trending pop music, you say?
I hate Spotify (I have to preface with this sentence)
But plenty of artists these days don’t bother releasing CDs and MP3s and you can legitimately only stream their songs.
I know small artists who were unable to send me the files of their own songs when I asked them. They just sent me a YouTube link and told me to listen there.
Oh, my apologies for being a mere mortal with a taste for mainstream mediocrity. Clearly, my lack of access to the obscure, avant-garde, underground artists you champion is a tragic oversight. I’ll just be over here enjoying my basic playlist, blissfully unaware of the elevated musical tastes reserved for the chosen few like yourself. Carry on enlightening us, oh connoisseur of the esoteric.
I saw some avant garde shit the other day, and there it was on spotify. Everyone is on spotify
Honestly, like… who isn’t on spotify? I think Metallica was holding out, but there on there now, and looks like Garth Brooks is also holding out. No one else I’ve ever looked up, including very small artists, were not on spotify.
Wake up babe, new Lemmy copypasta just dropped
No, there’s lots of niche artists on Spotify, as well as old stuff
How is it shitty in this case? That’s literally what OP bought, the right to listen to any book in Spotify’s catalog for free, for a certain number of hours. If they wanted to listen to a specific book unlimited they should have purchased that book directly.
Because thats what “buying” means, right.
They haven’t bought anything though. Or rather, they got exactly what they paid for, listening time.
I’m pretty sure this is a concept OP must’ve seen before, they can’t be that clueless. If you borrow a book from the library you don’t own it, and you have to be done with it by the time it’s due.
At this point I’m not sure if they’re just new to audiobooks or if they’re misrepresenting Spotify’s time-limited plans on purpose.
They baught 3 audiobooks and premium … But sure, shill for spotify.
They bought one book, the others were free with time limit.
If Spotify misrepresented the free books or was unclear about what they represent then by all means, they should be called out. But it’s a bit different from what OP has complained about.
Buying premium doesnt factor in for you at all?
Premium is pretty much only for music, the audio book part is more like a free demo. Including them in the normal premium sub is unsustainable.
I’ve got a cracked version of some dodgy russian app store
If you wanna selfhost your own solution, I can recommend Audiobookshelf. It scraps metadata from Apple, Amazon, Google etc, tracks on a per-user basis at what point in the book you are, can be used in a browser and has an android app. It’s easy to set up with Docker too. You can even add PDFs and epubs to the books.
Been using it for a few months and it has been great.
As for sourcing of audiobooks, aside from torrents there are also audiobb.com & audiobooksbee.com . They use RapidGator as host for a ddl.
Mobilism.org has also served me very well for over a decade
average mobilism enjoyer
Hey, thanks for the Audiobookshelf recommendation!
Recently I was looking for a audiobook player and Smart Audiobook Player was the best I found, but Audiobookshelf have almost all of the functions I liked like simultaneous dual timeline bar (one for the whole book and another for the current chapter), auto sleep, shake to reset sleep and so on. Just missed the small beep alert before the audio fade out on sleep.
Anyway, and all of this with the advantage of using my already selfhosted data, so no need to keep transferring files manually to the device. And all the progress are synced back to my homeserver, so I can use multiple devices without any problems.
Theres an iOS app too… only available via testflight, and I don’t recall where the link is… but its out there.
This isn’t exactly what you asked for and might not even work, but look up xManager. It lets you install a modded version of Shittify with premium features on free accounts – maybe this limitation is something they also modded away?
The moment they tried to make me pay just to skip songs was the moment I downloaded xmanager. Haven’t gone back since. Absolutely ridiculous what Spotify thinks I will pay for.
Enshitification!
The enshitification is real!
Go to your local library and ask if they have audiobook borrowing through Libby or a similar platform! Not only are you NOT limited on listening hours, but it’s free! You just might have to wait if all the “copies” are borrowed at the moment.
Also, if you have a cool library like I do, you might be able to borrow from multiple libraries. For example, my library card is for the St. Louis County Library, but it can also be used at the St. Charles County Library. So if I am looking for an audiobook on Libby, and SLCL has 3 virtual copies and they are all borrowed, I can search SCCL to see if they have any. I’ve had many situations where I’ll find one library or the other will have a copy available for borrowing with no wait.
Just to piggyback on this comment… If you have a dope library like mine, you don’t even have to go in person to get your library card and do all of the above. I signed up for a card online, downloaded Libby, got everything set up and had an ebook checked out that same day.
Does anyone know cities in the US where you can get a library card and not be from that city, or even state? I know there are a few
deleted by creator
Keep embracing digital only, assholes… This is what you’re signing up for.
I don’t have time to sit down and read books. I have the disease of modernity. Will you read to me when I call?
xManager
deleted by creator
If the experience that a paying customer gets is worse than the experience they get from pirating, then that’s the fault of the company selling that enshitified experience.
It’s wild how modern businesses are trying to kill themselves with every terrible idea they have to make more money.
I bought a few books off audible, and while I can still access them even without a subscription, I still have them converted to mp3 on my NAS, in case I ever lose access to audible for some reason.
Have you found a way to split those mp3s into several files by chapter etc.? All converters that I have tried so far just yield a single, several hours long mp3…
I always used SmartAudiobookPlayer (android). It saves your progress nicely. Never felt the need for chapters
I use Voice audiobook player, that can do that, too. But when I switch devices, … it’s easier to pick up where I left, if it’s at least separated by chapters (or as some MP3 CDs do every 3-5 minutes a new track).
Also I do sometimes buy mp3 audiobooks for a blind friend who prefers to listen to them on a CD player (buttons can be felt and its easier to use than a touch screen). But a single, several hours long mp3 is bad in this scenario. And as i didnt find a tool to split them easily, Audible exclusives were out of the question…
https://github.com/audiamus/AaxAudioConverter
This should be able to split them by chapter.
Thanks, I’ll try it
As shitty as Amazon is, I will say that the books I’ve gotten through Audible are all still there and I can listen to them whenever I want even though I don’t have a subscription or anything anymore.
Audible replaced a version of a book my boyfriend bought with a completely different version of the same book. I mean a different narrator and everything. He had purchased the book a few years earlier but he didn’t manage to get a refund from them.
The Martian by Andy weir was my first experience of this. They re-recorded it with will wheaton and I “lost” my original with RC Bray. Though I will admit my version was part of the plus catalog, I still didn’t get a choice.
Why would they think this is okay?
Why wouldn’t they, it’s not like anyone is making them act differently.
OP hasn’t purchased any book. They’re on a plan that lets them listen to any book for free, except it’s time-limited.
I purchased 3/5 books of the series. The 2 free books add up to 13 hours.
I’ve been enjoying LibroFM instead of Audible. Same subscription/credits per month model, but a portion goes to support a local bookstore of your choice. Feels way better to do that than give any extra money to Amazon.
Wait for a while and Amazon will go down the same route.
You bought the audiobooks on Spotify, and then they limited your listening time? What the fuck? Do you have a subscription? DIdn’t even know they sold audiobooks; just thought they had some free ones.
Exactly. I pay for Spotify premium, I purchased 3/5 books in this series, and maybe it’s because 2 of the books were free with premium (incl this last book) that it’s time limiting me. But if that’s the case it’s also counting time listened during my paid-for eBooks. Absolutely crazy to me.
So it’s supposed to be 15 hours/month included with your premium subscription? Since I’m not familiar with how Spotify audio books work, I thought you meant that you had a free account and was allowed to listen 15 hours to books that would be included/unlimited with a premium subscription. Contact support if it ate through your monthly credits faster that it should. If you’re a paying customer supports are usually quite helpful.
If this isn’t an unintended glitch that’s horse shit. I would cancel my account and tell them why.
2 ebooks could easily be >15hours. OP sounds like a bullshitter to me. I don’t see how they could come to the conclusion that “its also counting time listened during my paid-for ebooks”. They could provide more info, but they arent. I think they just got mad that they couldnt finish the last 20 minutes of the book (understandably) and decided to flame spotify
See: https://lemmy.world/comment/7069535
That doesn’t sound right, I’m betting it’s a bug due to some in the series being bought and some on the time limit deal. Reach out to support.
Yeah, it’s weird, I thought they were just included with premium, no idea there was a listening limit.