Local Audio Books vs Murmur

Local Audio Books plays the audiobooks you own, free classics in eight languages, and podcasts that just play. EVERYTHING ON ONE SCREEN Listen holds everything on your device, from every source: the book or episode you played last, with its progress and a play button, then the rest grouped — in progress, favourites, podcast episodes, not started, finished. Every source — your folders, each free catalogue, Podcasts — has its own tab, and Search looks through all of them at once. FREE AUDIOBOOKS IN YOUR LANGUAGE • LibriVox — public-domain books read by volunteers, with catalogues in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Polish • Wolne Lektury — Polish classics read by actors (CC BY-SA) • Project Gutenberg — synthetic narration Tap Listen now and the book plays at once while it downloads in the background. Afterwards it is yours offline, with author, narrator, source and license recorded. PODCASTS AND RADIO DRAMA Follow shows from recommendations, your country's top charts or a search of the podcast directory — or paste any feed address. Episodes stream straight away, newest first, and each keeps its own position. Download only the ones you want offline. YOUR FOLDER IS YOUR LIBRARY Point the app at a folder of audiobooks (one subfolder of MP3 or AAC files per book) on your device or in iCloud Drive. No hidden database: manage everything in Files or Finder. BUILT FOR LONG LISTENS • Resume exactly where you stopped • Sleep timer — in minutes, or at the end of a chapter • Speed from 0.8× to 2.5×, remembered for each book • Skip intervals you choose, chapters and bookmarks • Lock screen, headphone and CarPlay controls MADE FOR EVERY SCREEN A Liquid Glass design for iOS 26 with the system tab bar: each source is an icon with a count, and the bar tucks away as you scroll. On the iPhone Duo it becomes a rail on the right edge, right by your thumb. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account, no ads, no tracking. The network is used only for catalogues, podcasts, downloads and cover art. Available in English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese.

Murmur is a quiet audiobook player built for the last few hours of the evening. The part of the day where the lights start to come down, the pace shifts, and a book is meant to carry you the rest of the way. Most audiobook apps are built for daylight: bright surfaces, big buttons, high contrast for a screen you might glance at in the sun on a walk or a run. Murmur is the opposite. Dark by design, unhurried by design, and made for the dim room at the end of the day. (It works just as well during the day, too; it simply isn't designed around it.) Bring your own audiobooks (.m4b, .mp3, .m4a, .flac) in from Files, iCloud Drive, AirDrop, or anywhere iOS lets you reach. Murmur absorbs the kind of messy real-world libraries people actually own (folders of MP3s, embedded chapters, mixed metadata, missing covers) without making you tidy them first. If you've ever fallen asleep listening to an audiobook, you know the problem. When you read on paper, you close the book when your eyes get heavy. With audio, that doesn't happen. You drift off mid-chapter, the book keeps going, and in the morning, you have no idea where you actually stopped paying attention. Murmur fixes that. While you listen, the app pays attention to when sleep is detected by Apple Health (read-only). The next time you open the book, Murmur rewinds you to roughly where you actually drifted off, with a small buffer back so you can re-orient. That's the whole idea. No more waking up lost.