Shoutout to the Noctium app

First off, I have no affiliation with the app or dev other than rapidly becoming a fan.

I stumbled across Noctium for Android some weeks ago after randomly matching on a search term for audiobooks with OPDS support for Calibre server sync. It had bugs making it unusable at the time so I fired off an email to the dev, and two hours later, got back a solid response on how it would get fixed. Since then I've harassed the poor man with every manner of nonsense and everything has been taken into account with most already implemented or coming. We're talking random niche stuff like a setting to ignore AVRCP skip commands or updating the app manifest to expose it as an option to Samsung's Good Lock favorite media player setting.

At the time of this speaking I'm eagerly awaiting the next release to push audiobook progress to Koreader Sync the way it does with epubs (it's a multi-format app). It already exposed the sync hash in the UI after a previous request so once it starts pushing audiobook progress, I have everything I need to make a scrobble feature in Home Assistant. That's the sort of niche shit that's possible with a dev that listens.

I've also sent off details on Epub Media Overlay files and hoping for that to be a thing so I can start having synced epubs with embedded audiobooks instead of them being separate.

The one caveat is that it's not open source and is ad supported. The premium unlock is a one time purchase and not one of those obnoxious subscriptions, but I would have preferred it be FOSS and have a donate button. I'd have hit that button repeatedly the way things are going.