Coming in SoundLeaf 2.4: Listening Goals, NFC Tags, and Play from This Page
Table of Contents
Coming in SoundLeaf 2.4
SoundLeaf 2.4 brings listening time, streaks and goal progress onto Home, with a choice of how much space they take up. It also lets you start the audiobook from the page you’re reading and make NFC tags or QR codes for playback actions.
This is a preview of the upcoming release. The screenshots show a development build; the final release may change before it reaches the App Store.
Your listening on Home
Home can show your listening time and goal progress alongside the books and podcasts you’re actually using. There are five styles: Library stats, Numbers, Activity, Compact ring and Focus ring. Keep the original library totals, choose a small row of numbers, or give the goal more room.
Choose the style in Settings > Appearance, or press and hold the Home stats row. The choice belongs to that library, so a podcast library can use a compact display while books get a larger goal ring.
Daily and weekly goals live under Settings > Listening Stats. Pick a target that suits your listening, or leave goals off. Books and podcasts count together for the selected account. Saved accounts don’t get combined into one total.
These figures come from listening recorded on your Audiobookshelf server. Offline listening appears after it syncs.
Book and podcast quotes also get some variety, with encouragement that reflects progress toward the goal. The controls to keep the quieter library-stats display are still there.
Start the narrator from your page
Read Along already moves the text with the audio. In 2.4, you can go the other way: open the reader menu and choose Play from this page, or select a passage of at least three words and play from there.
This is for the point where you’ve read ahead and want to put the phone away and listen. You shouldn’t need to scrub through a long chapter trying to recognise a sentence you’ve just read.
The book needs both audio and an EPUB. Matching a passage to narration can take time and can miss, particularly when editions differ or the same phrase occurs in several places. Audio Position Matching has Low, Medium and High strictness choices, and saved audio transcripts can be reused for later searches.
Downloaded ebooks also save their page indexes, making it faster to move around a book when you reopen it.
A tag by the bed, or a QR code for a book
NFC & QR is available in Settings, book menus and podcast show settings. Choose an action, then write a tag on a supported iPhone or generate a QR code to share. QR generation is also available on iPad.
A bedside tag could resume playback. A QR card could open a particular book. A podcast tag can start the latest episode, the latest unfinished one, a random episode, or a random unplayed episode. Random Unplayed skips both started and finished episodes; if there aren’t any left, it leaves playback alone and tells you.
Playback controls include pause, bookmarks, speed and sleep timer actions. When several saved accounts could handle a link, SoundLeaf can ask which account to use.
The code carries an action, not a copy of the audiobook or a server login. Someone scanning it still needs SoundLeaf and access to the relevant library. Reading a tag inside the NFC screen shows what it will do; Try this action is the separate step that runs it.
Remove finished downloads automatically
SoundLeaf 2.4 adds an option to automatically remove downloaded audiobooks after you finish listening, similar to the cleanup available for podcast episodes. It frees up space without having to clear each finished book by hand.
Go back after an accidental jump
A large accidental jump no longer has to mean searching for your old place. A Go back banner can return you to the previous listening position. It stays available for 30 seconds of playback and waits while you’re paused.
Speeds now extend to 3.5×, 4× and 5× for books and podcasts on the phone and Watch. Remaining time adjusts to the speed you chose; elapsed time still refers to your position in the book.
There are also fixes for late sync responses overwriting newer progress and older listening sessions undoing a newer finished mark. Saving the ebook page should no longer bring back an older audio position.
Trying the upcoming release
2.4 is still upcoming. TestFlight is where to try prerelease builds when they’re available. The App Store continues to carry the current public release.
If you’re trying passage playback, a useful bug report includes the book, the audio and ebook editions, and whether the match failed or landed in the wrong place. For NFC, include the iPhone model and whether you scanned inside SoundLeaf or from outside the app.
Hemant