Material Audiobook Player for Android review

Material Audiobook Player is a free application for Android devices designed to make the experience of listening to audiobooks on Android better.

While you may use any audio player to play audiobooks on Android, most are not suitable for the task.

This may not matter all the time, but when you try to play long audiobooks or entire series, it matters.

For instance, there is usually no option to use bookmarks, or remember the last position of audiobooks.

Material Audiobook Player is an open source application that is free to use. The application requires only one extra permissions, access to media, which is reasonable.

Tip: find out how to turn books into audiobooks here.

Material Audiobook Player

The application itself is compatible with Android 4.0.3 and up, and updated regularly.

Material Audiobook Player has been designed to focus on the essentials. First thing you do is add individual audiobooks or folders to the application. You may add as many as you require, and all are displayed in the audiobook listing afterwards.

The app separates audiobooks by folder which is useful if audiobooks are separated into dozens or hundreds of audio files. The reason why this is useful is because Material Audiobook Player displays them as a single entry on its startpage.

The list supports two view modes; thumbnail mode and list mode which both work well. Simply tap on an audiobook to start playing it from the start page of the app.

One thing that is missing is an option to search the audiobooks or filter the list. That does not matter if only a few audiobooks are added to the device, but if there are a few dozens or hundreds, you may end up scrolling quite a bit.

Player features

The player supports the usual feature that you expect from an audio player. Start and pause playback, or use a slider to change the position.

Additionally, you may jump to the next or previous chapter, or use the chapter selecting menu to jump to any available chapter. Chapters need to be available for audiobooks for the feature to work.

There is also an option to set a sleep timer to pause playback after a set period of time. The sleep time is set to 20 minutes by default, but you may change it in the options. The app bookmarks the exact position each time the sleep timer is set. You may disable that feature in the options as well.

Other options include setting bookmarks to jump to the exact position at a later point in time, or modifying the playback speed to increase or decrease it.

Closing Words

Material Audiobook Player is a light application that focuses on the most important aspects of playing audiobooks on a mobile device.

It is not as feature-complete as the commercial Listen Audiobook Player for instance, but many users may not require advanced features such as widgets, Tasker control, or Android Auto support.

If you are looking for an audioplayer that works, ships with important audiobook playback features, and is free and light on permissions, then you may find this program to your liking.

Now You: Which program do you use to play audiobooks?

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