Anansi Studio User Guide

Anansi Studio is an audiobook player and studio. It keeps your audiobooks in one library, plays them with chapters, lyrics and lock-screen controls, lets you edit everything inside the files, and turns your documents into new audiobooks read by a voice you choose.

This guide covers every part of the app. If you are new, start with Getting started.

Contents

Start here

• Getting started: installing, your first launch, the welcome tour and finding your way around.

Listening

• The library: views, shelves, grouping, sorting, search and managing your books.
• Adding audiobooks: files, folders, drag and drop, and opening files with the app.
• The player: playback controls, speed, volume, the sleep timer, chapters and the mini player.
• Lyrics and reading along: following the narration in the lyrics or in the original document.

Creating and editing

• Editing a book: details, chapters, cover art and lyrics, and writing them into the audio file.
• Making audiobooks from documents: turning a PDF, EPUB, Word, Markdown or text file into an audiobook.
• Voices: choosing, downloading and tuning the voices that narrate your books, and adding a second voice to a book.

Sharing, backing up and syncing

• Sharing audiobooks: sending a book as one .m4b file, and receiving one.
• Backup and restore: snapshots of your library, and bringing them back.
• Syncing your devices: keeping your place and your books the same on every device on your Wi-Fi.
• Where your audiobooks live: the library folder, moving it, and finding missing files.

Reference

• Settings: every setting, section by section.
• Help and feedback: this guide in the app, tips, hints, what's new, and reporting a problem.
• Keyboard shortcuts and accessibility
• Supported file formats
• Platform differences: what works where.
• Troubleshooting: common problems and questions.
• Glossary: the words this guide uses.

How this guide is written

• Names of buttons, menus and settings are in bold, as they appear in the app. A path such as Settings → Appearance → Language means: open Settings, go to the Appearance section, then find Language.
• Anansi Studio changes its layout with the size of the window. A wide window (a tablet, or a computer window) shows sidebars and side-by-side panes; a narrow window (a phone, or a small window) shows menus and tabs instead. Where the two differ, the guide describes both.
• Notes that apply to only some devices are marked, for example Desktop: (macOS, Windows and Linux) or Phone and tablet: (Android, iPhone and iPad). The full list is in Platform differences.

For the people building the guide

Each page begins with front matter: a title, a one-line description and an order that sets its place in the contents. Pages link to each other with relative links (player.md, settings.md#playback), and the anchors follow the usual heading-to-slug rule (lower case, spaces as hyphens, punctuation dropped). This page is the table of contents.