I'm Wei, and I make Voxlight by myself. It's an audiobook player for books you own. Start with 104 free public-domain audiobooks that come synced to their ebooks, or connect your own Plex Media Server or Audiobookshelf server and bring your library with you.
I built it because I kept hearing lines I wanted to keep. Every app I tried gave me a timestamp bookmark, and I never once went back to one of those. So the first thing I made was Moments.
MOMENTS
Hear something good, tap once. Voxlight saves that spot with the narrator's words written out, plus a short clip of the audio. You can share a Moment as a card, or as a little video with captions that follow the words. They sync to your iPad over iCloud, and the History tab keeps them as a daily listening journal.
THE WHOLE BOOK, SYNCED BEFORE YOU PRESS PLAY
Pair an audiobook with its ebook or PDF and Voxlight times every word of the book up front, not just the part you're hearing right now. So you can scroll way ahead, tap a sentence you haven't reached yet, and it plays from right there. The free classics come synced already. Your own books sync on your phone.
104 FREE BOOKS, 44 OF THEM BY BLACK WRITERS
The shelf has 104 public-domain audiobooks, each with its ebook and every word synced. A few are on your phone at first launch, so you can press play before you import anything. The rest download when you tap them. 44 of those books are by Black writers, and I wanted them right up front: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Phillis Wheatley, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth and a lot more. The recordings are by LibriVox volunteers, who are the best.
LIVE TEXT
No ebook? Live Text shows what the narrator is saying while you listen, kind of like lyrics in a music app. It transcribes on your phone, and you can search everything you've heard later.
THE READER
Scroll or turn pages, pick your font and theme, and footnotes pop up right where you are. Highlight, write notes, or sketch in the margin.
IPHONE DUO
If you have an iPhone Duo, open it and the book opens with it, with the gutter right on the fold. Stand it up like a little laptop and the page sits on top while the player or your notes sit underneath.
PLEX AND AUDIOBOOKSHELF
Connect your own Plex Media Server to import audiobooks you own. Sign in with your Plex account and your audiobook library shows up in the Books tab. Stream a book right away or download it for offline, and your place syncs back to the server, so it's waiting in your other Plex apps too. More than one server works.
Audiobookshelf works too. Sign in with your server address, username and password, browse your library in the Books tab, and download any book. If the server has the ebook, it comes along and you can sync the two.
Streaming from Plex doesn't count toward the free limit. Only downloads do.
YOUR OWN FILES
M4B, MP3 and M4A all work, and a folder of numbered MP3s comes in as one book with chapters.
THE PLAYER
Speed goes from 0.5x to 3x and tells you what time you'll finish. The sleep timer can stop at the end of a chapter. Skips land at the start of a sentence. And if you bump the scrubber by accident, one tap takes you back.
YOUR DATA
Moments export to Markdown, JSON or CSV (Readwise works). There's no account, no analytics and no server on my end. Transcription runs on your device and sync goes through your own iCloud. The privacy label says "Data Not Collected" and I mean it.
PRICE
Five of your own books are free with every feature, Live Text included, and the free classics don't count toward that. Voxlight Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. It removes the limit and adds four finishes for the player and reader: a titanium radio receiver, a handheld console with an LCD, a soft-touch slate, and Phosphor, an amber text terminal. Liquid Glass stays free. Family Sharing is on.
Requires iOS 26 or later.
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