Audiobooks

I’m doing some work that requires the use of headphones but I wanted to listen to my audiobook at the same time. These headphones are noise canceling, so playing the book on my phone wasn’t going to work well.

I have all my audiobooks in a share drive, so I figured I should make a quick browser to select one and play it. I knew mpv had support for saving the position of playback so it could resume, so a quick script stitched it all together.

#!/bin/sh

book=$(find "${AUDIOBOOKS:-${HOME}/audiobooks/}" -maxdepth 1 -type d -print | fzf --multi --select-1 --exit-0)

if [ -n "${book}" ]; then
    mpv --save-position-on-quit --no-audio-display "${book}"
fi

If you set AUDIOBOOKS as an env var pointing to your own book collection, then you can run this script and it will browse the list with FZF. It works on books that are just one mp3 or those that are a whole directory full.

While it’s running you can use keyboard shortcuts in that terminal window to change the volume or skip around. Or, if you want to send full-featured command instructions, you can enable mpv’s socket and pass commands that way.

To enable the socket server, edit ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf:

# Enable the IPC support to control mpv from the command-line.
input-ipc-server=~~/socket

Then you can send echo commands through to that socket and it’ll update your playback session. Here’s a little mpv-cmd helper script I use:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z "$*" ]; then
    echo "Missing command param. See https://mpv.io/manual/master/#list-of-input-commands"
else
    echo "$*" | socat - "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mpv/socket"
fi

And then you can tell your audiobook to jump to a specific time like so:

mpv-cmd set time-pos 5:21:43

Fun!