Accordion
Accordion is the audiobook library. Put the book's text in the folder beside the recording and it lines the two up, word by word. Almost everything awkward about an audiobook follows from nobody having done that: you cannot search a recording, you cannot quote it, and it cannot tell you what page you are on.
Almost none of the music player is reused here
A book is not a playlist. There is no queue and there will not be one: a book already comes in the order it goes in, and the only decision you make is where in it you are. One book is one folder, Accordion reads it and never writes inside it, and where you got to is kept in Orchestra's own folder instead of in yours.
If the book arrived as ninety separate files it is still one recording, and a place saved on the version that arrived as one lands on the same sentence.
What it does
Built for eleven hours, not four minutes
Back thirty seconds, play the last minute again, and repeat the paragraph, which is measured from the pauses in the recording instead of guessed at. Speed from a half to double with the narrator's pitch held steady, because a reader at one and a half times with the pitch let go stops sounding like the same person.
Reading along
If you have the book as well as the recording, put the epub, PDF or text file in the book's folder. The words are fitted to the recording and the line being read is marked as you listen. It is fitted, not transcribed, so it holds up on a recording of a different edition, and where the two genuinely do not line up it says so instead of pretending.
Or your own machine listens to it
If you do not have the text, your computer can work it out from the recording itself. This is slow. A long book is hours of work, it happens in the background and survives a restart, and Accordion measures your machine for a minute first, so the rate it quotes you is one it has actually tested. Leaving it overnight is a perfectly ordinary answer.
Nothing is sent anywhere. No recogniser is bundled and none is downloaded, so it uses whichever one you have installed, and says so plainly when you have none.
Passages you keep
Keeping a passage stores two times into your own recording, so nothing is copied out of your file. It comes back with the words that were spoken, the chapter, how far through you were, and the page of the printing on your shelf where that can be worked out. The list prints, for when the conversation about the book happens with the book in your hands.
The page in your hands
Page numbers belong to a printing, not to a book. A PDF that carries its own gives you the real page. For a paperback, photograph a few of its pages, or type a line of each into a text file, and a place in the recording points into that printing.
What is worked out is always shown as a range of pages, and the width of that range is the error Accordion measured. It will not quote you a single page number it cannot stand behind.
Music underneath
On a daemon that has both libraries, a book can play over a bed of your own music, levelled well under the reading, and one press on pause carries both. On a daemon with only books this simply is not there.
Install it beside the others, on its own, or not at all
The libraries are separate engines. A daemon says which of them it carries and the app follows, so with one of them installed the app is that one thing and nothing stands in the way of it. A library you did not install has no routes, no settings and no commands.
Harmonica, for music Ensemble, for what you follow