Postby Carl » Sat Mar 23, 2024 5:28 pm
Recently I've been appreciating how useful the GoodReader iOS app is for language learning. I've been using it for reading PDFs and listening to mp3s for a decade or so, back when I got it for an iPod Touch with a 30-pin connector.
It sorts files alphabetically by file name, and it resumes playback on any number of files where you left off. The user can select playing a single file, all the files in a folder, or a selection of files in the folder. It can be set to play a file or files once or to repeat either a single file or to go through the entire folder or a selection of files and then repeat that group of files from the beginning.
The UI indicates whether a file has been played or not by the file's color, so if when I open a folder with 30 Pimsleur lessons, I see which ones I've listened to, so I know which one to play today. I can also mark a file or set of files as unplayed, after playing them.
The UI has an easy-to-use nested hierarchy of folders. (VLC is great in many ways, but I've never figured out how to use the folder system on it on either iOS or Android.) I mostly transfer files from a Mac via USB, but GoodReader has a built-in browser that can download audio directly on the device.
Other helpful features:
* GoodReader supports reading PDFs while listening to audio, so you can do L-R within one app.
* You can use highlighting and many other tools to mark up the PDFs.
* You can use it to store files but then export the files to other apps, to overcome any limitations of GoodReader. (I've started exporting Pimsleur files to PocketCasts, which allows me to rewind 15 seconds using controls on my headphones; the headphones can control moving forward or backward one file at a time in GoodReader but not X seconds.)
* It will open .zip files, so you can download an audiobook in chapters from Librivox or elsewhere as a .zip and open the .zip within GoodReader.
I recently set out to emulate Ryan Smallwood's method of putting FSI course audio on in the background, using GoodReader. Instead of importing the files into Audacity to make one long file, I just put all the files directly into GoodReader. I can play six hours of files in the same folder from start to finish, if I want. Or I can go to any individual file and use it in connection with a lesson, or just repeat it multiple times. (This method doesn't allow me to remove silences to provide continuous audio.)
I paid $5 for GoodReader originally, and I think I paid an additional $5 or $10 for an upgrade when I installed it on a new device once. They're now promoting more features with a subscription version, but I have what I need without the subscription. I hope the pay-once version is still available to new users, but I don't know whether it is.
Limitations of GoodReader:
* No speed control for the audio
* No ability to build playlists with files in the app, except by copying the files or moving them to a different folder. So if you want a given file in multiple playlists, you need to make multiple copies of the file.
* In the PDF reader, highlighting a word brings up a GoodReader-specific menu for annotating the text; there doesn't seem to be a way to access the handy iOS dictionaries to look up a word in the app.
* It supports PDF, .txt, and .html files, but not epubs.
3 x
Honestly I only got it to be able to scrobble on last.fm, and because it's an android device. If you don't need these functions you can get a simple Mp3 player much cheaper.