With over a million titles to choose from and several different ways to enjoy its audiobook library, Amazon’s Audible service remains one of the best ways to listen to your favorite audiobooks on the go, although there are certainly cheaper alternatives. Additionally, with the app’s support for Amazon’s Read & Listen feature, many audiobooks on Audible now allow you to seamlessly switch between listening and reading on your devices, as long as you own both the Kindle and audio versions of a book.
If you use Audible to listen to audiobooks, you can personalize your experience in several ways. We highly recommend playing around with some of the different settings offered within the app. Not only will these changes help improve your concentration while listening, but they will also make your audiobooks easier to navigate and can even help ensure your next listen will always be ready.
Turn off notifications
Notifications can be a great way to keep track of what’s happening across all your apps. And with Audible, it can be useful for knowing when new releases come out. However, it is also a great opportunity to have fun. If you really want to increase immersion when listening to audiobooks, you can easily turn off notifications in the Audible app by going to Profile in the bottom right corner, then selecting the gear icon at the top of the app. From there, select Push notifications then customize which ones you want to leave enabled or disabled.
If you want to go further, you can also enable Do Not Disturb mode or set up a Focus mode just for listening to your audiobooks. This will stop incoming notifications from other apps, reducing interruptions while listening. This isn’t actually an Audible setting on its own, but it can work in tandem with the notification changes above.
Enable automatic downloads
Another very useful setting that you should definitely take advantage of is the automatic download option on Audible. This feature ensures that your audiobooks are always downloaded to your devices, allowing you to listen to them seamlessly at any time. Although some titles support streaming, downloading your files will help ensure you can still listen, even if you don’t have cell service. This means less time waiting for books to download when you’re already on the go, as well as less chance of problems due to slow mobile data.
To enable automatic downloads in Audible, go to your profile, then select the settings gear icon at the top of the page. Then choose Data and storagethen turn on Automatic download by toggling it to the bottom of the list. Now any new purchases you make will automatically download to your device. You can also change the audio quality settings on this page, and we recommend using High quality for downloads. This will ensure clearer audio quality, but you may need to manage your phone’s storage space, depending on how much space you have.
Change playback speed
One of the benefits of audiobooks is being able to listen to them while you do something else. However, depending on the voice actor, some of the speech or narrative may be a little too slow for your personal taste. Or maybe you’re trying to reach the goal of reading a certain number of books in a month. If you want to change the playback speed of an audiobook, you can do so at any time while listening in the Audible app.
In the Now Playing screen, look for the Speed option in the lower left corner of the screen. Press it once to bring up a menu with a slider and several speed options. Pressing the + or – icons at the ends of the slider will change the speed by 0.5, so you can easily go to 1.5 or even go down to 0.5 if you want.
Any changes you make to the speed will only apply to the current book. If you want to change the default speed, go to the settings menu by tapping the three dots in the top right corner, select Player, scroll down to Narration Speed and choose your preferred option. In the future, all your books will be read at the new speed by default.
Change jump interval
Another useful player setting you can change in Audible is the skip interval. This feature is found in the audio player and gives you the ability to skip forward or backward through the audio for a set amount of time. This makes it easy to return to important parts of a book that you want to listen to again or skip past certain sections. By default, this duration is set to 30 seconds, but you can customize the skip interval in the app settings.
To customize the skip interval, open the audio player and tap the three dots at the top of the screen. Select Player Settings then find the section titled Move forward and backward. Tapping the option here will bring up a window that allows you to customize both the rewind and fast forward intervals. You can set it as low as 10 seconds or as high as 90 seconds. Once you have set both, simply tap the Together button to lock it in place.