Kind of off topic, but related: I recently bought an audio book from Humble Bundle and have been trying to figure out how to put it on my iPhone.I don't listen to audio books at home, only in the car or while I'm walking.
Anyone know how to easily download an audiobook from Humble Bundle and put it on an iPhone to listen to later?
Another way is to use app like GoodReader, which has a file system of its own, you can create folders, and you can download files from websites/URLs to them. GoodReader can not only store and organize your files, but it also opens all the popular formats in the app (PDFs, images, MP3s, etc.).
I download those to dropbox, then either sync them in the dropbox app, or use an app like goodreader or eddy (there are others), which can play from a dropbox folder
If I am not mistaken what they give you is a huge MP3. You need to download it, import it to iTunes, and put it on your phone just like you would any other MP3.
Wouldn't it just be magical if you could download any file to your phone without needing a computer? Because that's what my $180 (without a contract) Moto G allows me to do.
Most of the ways I can think of pretty much involve iTunes for syncing the audiobook to your device. It's the one thing I can't stand about being an iDevice user. Another way to do it though might be to upload it to DropBox, open it from there, then maybe try to save it in your phone somehow?
The "easy" thing to do is to download it to your computer and sync it through iTunes.
As far as 3rd party audiobook player solutions, no idea. Maybe there's one that can download it, or maybe they're all tied in to their own audiobook stores. That seems to be the trend these days :(
I don't have an iPad, but perhaps you could download it on your laptop in a Dropbox folder (or a similar service), and then open it in the Dropbox app using something like VLC?
You'd think it was trivial, but it's shockingly hard to do without using iTunes. For a person who frequents HN, that's extremely unintuitive. And iTunes is terrible, so that solution is out.
It took me forever to realize that just because I can kinda-sorta interact with my iPhone as a storage device doesn't mean that it's even remotely going to actually behave as one. The whole process is infuriating if you go in expecting it to be simple (which, given it's an iPhone, one might reasonably expect). Try to find an obvious way to put an mp3 on an iPhone without some odd middleware software; some of the software looks sketchy - and/or has a cost, and a many suggestions are to just use Google Play or Amazon Music. I also like the Winamp plugin from 2010, as well. That sort of list is pretty much the opposite of trivial. I mean, if it was drag-and-drop, sure, but this that ain't.
Personally? I ended up just uploading my music to Amazon and use their app. It's less infuriating than the Music app on the stock iPhone.
iTunes is out? Well, that's a pointless constraint if I've ever seen one. Yes it's terrible software, but plenty of people run terrible software once in a blue moon because it's the only way to accomplish some task.
Also, you say "For a person who frequents HN that's extremely unintuitive"... are you implying HN users are incapable of using google? That HN users are not aware that a locked-down Apple ecosystem means there's no user freedom?
I'd expect the users of HN to be a large overlap with the people familiar with Stallman's views and how Apple is known to behave. I would not expect the regular man on the street to know what "walled garden" meant in terms of apps nor what "closed source lockin" meant, but I'd expect the average HN user to be very familiar with those concepts.
I find your claim that such a simple idea is unintuitive to an HN user demeaning towards all of us.
Specifically, I meant that usually there's a reasonable work-around. Something you can probe, inspect, and otherwise work with. In this case there really just isn't anything useful at a high level.
A better term might be it seems to violate the Law of Least Astonishment, but from the hacker perspective instead: I have a device that's really just spoofing acting like a storage device. There's a lot of side trips that normally can be taken to work around this, and each are the same sort of no-op, since it's not for real. This sort of thing was common for the old 'dumb' phones, but it seemed like it was because they were too dumb to behave properly; now here's a smart phone being dumb. It's a bit unexpected, at least for what seem like obvious things like "add mp3". But there we are. The whole time there's a feeling of "gosh, surely there's a better way" and there just really isn't: install iTunes and let it do whatever it wants, or you just don't get to put that mp3 on your phone.
And wanting to avoid installing iTunes isn't pointless. I mean, you may not see it, but there are certainly reasons not to. Heck, just failing to update iTunes was useful for a few years due to some odd DRM workarounds (mostly for a WinAmp addon that read iTunes music files). Besides, it's fairly invasive - you may only use it rarely, but it installs a couple services and tries to jump in when the phone connects (all can be administered, but it's a pain cleaning up that mess). While I've finally come to just tolerate it, I don't appreciate it.
(Perhaps I should use counterintuitive? I would hope that would get the same idea across without somehow triggering offense. The problem I'm describing is of expectation and should be orthogonal to intelligence. There's a lot of subjectivity to it, but no reason to take offense. Mindsets filter, so why would a hacker find the same things intuitive as your average user?)
It is trivial. And it is not shockingly hard. It's precisely as hard as anyone would expect it to be. Apple doesn't want you to do it, so you need multiple third party apps that risk being banned from the app store to implement it.
(to clarify: If it were impossible, which it very well might be, that would still not be shocking)
You're of course correct; the term shocking here is pure rhetoric. It would be shocking only if probing for a solution actually caused the device to electrically feedback, which would then be both literally and figuratively shocking :P (I've ruled this out so far, I hope.)
It's not trivial. They give me 50 mp3s in a zip folder. The guy was talking about troubles downloading an mp3 to an iOS device. Please, feel free to send me a LMGTFY that has a result showing how to open a zip file of mp3s on an iOS device without having iTunes on a desktop.
* [I know I'm not being helpful, but I couldn't resist. Haven't tried doing that on my iPhone when I had one, but pretty easy to move stuff around on Android or other OS'es]
Yeah. Let me know when GarageBand runs on an Android and I'll buy one in half a second. I require that app to compose on the go and open my projects in Logic Pro afterwards. It's absolutely the most critical part of my workflow.
Composing on the subway, to open files later in Logic and make them into full-blown musical pieces? It's literally what sold me on the platform.
Oh. Wait. GarageBand is, and always will be, iOS/Mac OS only. Guess I can't use Android.
But then, as a musician, what breaks my workflow more than not being able to simply download MP3's onto my device? It makes me want to bang my head against a wall.
Until then? It's not a computer. This is.