Nine Lives Audiobook Player

If the store shut down tomorrow, would you still have your books?

Nine Lives plays the audiobooks you actually own. Point it at a folder on your phone and it builds a real library. Or connect it to your own Audiobookshelf server and take the whole thing offline. Free, no ads, and nothing phones home.

YOUR FILES, NO SERVER REQUIRED
Pick a folder. Nine Lives reads your files, finds the covers, keeps the chapters, and remembers exactly where you stopped. MP3, M4A, M4B, OPUS, FLAC. Nothing to sign up for, no account, no cloud in the middle. If you buy DRM-free audiobooks, download them from your library, or record your own, they work here.

YOUR AUDIOBOOKSHELF SERVER, EVERYWHERE
Nine Lives is a full Audiobookshelf client. Browse your libraries, download books for offline listening, and keep progress in sync in both directions. Lose signal mid-chapter and it keeps playing, then flushes your position back to the server when you reconnect. Set both up and switch whenever you want ... the local folders on your phone and your server library, in one app.

BUILT FOR LONG LISTENS
- Chapter list and precise seeking, even on very long books
- Bookmarks
- A 30-minute sleep timer that pauses the book when it runs out
- Android Auto, so your book follows you into the car
- Full media-notification controls

More comes with the paid unlock, including every playback speed. Full list at the end.

NOTHING PHONES HOME
No analytics. No tracking. No advertising. No AI features. No Static Hum servers, because there are none ... your library never touches us. Crash reports are opt-in and sent by email only if you choose to send one. Your Audiobookshelf credentials are encrypted on-device with AES-256-GCM. The Data safety section says no data collected because no data is collected.

THE ARCHIVE SHELF
Remove a folder and the cover and the listening history stay behind. Books you have finished do not vanish just because the files moved, and if those files ever come back, a rescan restores them on its own. Browsing the shelf is a paid unlock feature (full list at the end).

THE NIGHTWATCH DOSSIER
Your last thirty days of listening, rendered as a card you can keep or share. How long, when, what you finished, and what you keep starting. The thirty-day window is free and never expires. Longer retrospectives are a paid unlock feature (full list at the end).

WHAT FREE GETS
Free is the whole player, not a demo of it. Every local folder on your phone, your whole Audiobookshelf server, every sort order, and the thirty-day Dossier. Free keeps one downloaded book at a time and plays at 1.0x.

THE PAID UNLOCK, IN FULL
One optional purchase, paid once, opens all of this:
- Every playback speed, 0.5x to 3.0x
- Unlimited offline books, and the download queue
- Full sleep timer control, including custom durations
- Silence skipping
- Equalizer and volume boost
- Auto-rewind on resume
- The AMOLED and Candlelight themes
- Series, author and genre grouping
- The Archive Shelf, and Dossier reports beyond thirty days

No subscription and no ads, either way. If you bought Nine Lives when it was a paid app, you already have all of it. Nothing is taken away.

Nine Lives is free and open source software, GPLv3. The source is public at github.com/StaticHumStudio.

Static Hum Studio. Software has always been here.