Turn Overcast Into an Amazing Audiobook App

Overcast is one of the best podcasting apps on the market, but I decided that I wanted to use it to listen to audiobooks. The only problem? Overcast only works with podcast feeds.

As far as I can tell, there isn’t a simple way to manually load in MP3s or point the app directly at a file. However, I didn’t let this limitation discourage me; instead, I came up with a convoluted solution that probably isn’t for the faint of heart.

Update, March 2016: As of Overcast 2.5, patrons can upload DRM-free audio files for their own personal use. When you upload a file, it goes directly to storage hosted by Marco Arment, the app’s creator, so you don’t have to do any further setup. I’m still using the home-grown podcast configuration I explain below, but if you want to skip all that, it’s as easy as becoming an Overcast patron.

There are two really good reasons I went to so much effort: Smart Speed and Voice Boost. Smart Speed is a killer app for listening to the spoken word – it automatically speeds up podcasts and audiobooks by dynamically snipping out pauses, all without distortion. As for Voice Boost, it automatically equalizes the volume in your file, when comes in handy for too-quiet books.

Overcast also tracks how much time you’ve saved thanks to Smart Speed, and it’s kind of astonishing. I’ve used Overcast to listen to two books so far – Funny Girl and The Library at Mount Char – but it’s already saved me six hours of time. When I tried to listen to Funny Girl at normal speed as an experiment, the pauses were excruciating.

How did I manage to pull this off? I installed Podcast Generator, an “open source podcast publishing platform”. It runs in PHP and doesn’t need a MySQL database, so it’s very easy to set up. Once you’ve installed it on a server, you can use an FTP program to upload M4A or MP3 files and Podcast Generator will automatically add them as new episodes in your feed.

Here’s my current workflow for transferring audiobooks into Overcast:

1. Download an MP3 audiobook from places such as Downpour, SYNC or your local library’s Overdrive collection.
2. If your audiobook comes in parts, you’ll probably want to convert it into one combined file. I use a program called Join Together, which generates an M4B file and automatically adds it to iTunes.
   • If you do create a combined M4B, you’ll need to change the file extension to M4A before you upload the file into Podcast Generator.
   • This doesn’t work with extremely long books (anything involving George R.R. Martin), which will need to remain broken into smaller parts.
3. Upload your audiobook into Podcast Generator’s media folder.
4. Go into the Podcast Generator Admin console and choose “FTP Feature (Auto Indexing)” to refresh your feed. Your audiobook should now appear in the list of episodes.
5. I like to edit the metadata for new episodes so that they have proper descriptions and author information, but this isn’t strictly necessary. If you want to change the order of the books in your feed, you’ll need to edit the date of the episode.
6. Once you’ve finished adding audiobooks, go to the main page of your Podcast Generator installation and click on the RSS Feed button. This should give you your feed url, which will look something like http://example.com/feed.xml. Open Overcast and  use the “Add URL” option to subscribe to that link.

You can now stream or download audiobooks in Overcast to your heart’s content!