Audiobook files being strangely shortened

[Indigoquilter]

I originally posted to the Apps subforum about this, but now I've realised that the problem seems to be my tablet instead.

I play audiobooks, so naturally I want my app to save my place when I turn the tablet off and on again. I put two audiobooks onto my tablet. With the first, it got a few hours in and then randomly moved straight into the next audiobook. The file had been buggy anyway, so I gave up on that one.

However, with the second, which is Burnett's The Secret Garden (no idea why I was randomly in the mood for that), it does a very strange thing. I listened to about an hour and a half of it, stopping somewhere in the vicinity of chapter 8. Next time I turned the tablet on, it had gone back to Chapter 2. There was no way of jumping ahead to Chapter 8 using any of the apps I could find at that point, and I wasn't just going to leave it playing and keep checking up on it to see where it had got to, so I went back to listening to the book on my laptop on MediaMonkey, which does at least have a sliding progress bar that you can move if it loses your place through a crash or similar.

Today I made another effort to find an app that would make it easier to refind my place if I lost it, and discovered that Ginkgo Audio Book Player does this. So I installed it, opened the book, slid the progress bar, and discovered that it thinks the end of the file is someone saying "Chapter 2". This is the point at which I registered that all the audiobook apps I'd installed were treating the file as 9:40 long. I'd been assuming that meant the book was 9 hours 40 min long, which is reasonable for a book of that length. It actually meant 9 min 40 seconds, which is why it conks out after just over one chapter. The book is actually 6:57:40 long, and I've just checked that by opening my Dropbox folder. I don't have any problems playing the book in MediaMonkey, and it has happily got about 2 1/2 hours in without losing my place or doing anything untoward. Any idea what is going on here?

ETA: I've just plugged the tablet into my laptop and tried copying files over from there, thinking that maybe it was a problem with Dropbox. No matter how I copy the file over, including creating whole new folders for it, it comes out as 191MB, totalling 9m40 long. What is even weirder is that the first time I played the book, it went well past the 9m40 point. It's just that after I turned the tablet off that time, it reverted to the 9m40 point and won't go past it. Is there something on my tablet which is preventing me from adding files past a certain length? Could it be the file managers I have installed, for instance? ETA2: Nope, just tried uninstalling them, turning the tablet off, and turning it on again, and it still does exactly the same thing when I copy the file over. What on earth is happening? I really don't want to have to do a hard reset and lose all the stuff I've spent the last two weeks painstakingly setting up.

 

[Indigoquilter]

Update: it doesn't do this with another novel. All seven hours of The Passion of New Eve are there, I just checked. Apparently it has Views on my reading matter, and doesn't think I should be listening to children's lit. Or possibly it dislikes Librivox. Anyway, they're both MPEG Layer 3 Audio files, and I cannot figure out why it's messing up one of them but not the other. I then tried copying across another book, The Final Voyage of Jack Aubrey, and this time it shortened a 01:58:16 book to 00:01:04. It seems to be completely arbitrary, unless it's a secret lifeform and has very specific taste in books. Being able to play audiobooks is one of the main reasons why I bought this wretched tablet to begin with.

Should I try converting the books to a different format? If so, which one, and which software should I use to convert it with?

ETA (sorry about all of these): I'm continuing to copy various files in to see if I can figure out what's going on. Kindred seemed to copy over OK, but once I tried to play it, using the progress bar to hop about inside the book, I would direct it to one point in the book and it would hop to another point, or even another book. Something is absolutely borked here.

 

[dsneedmd]

Go buy a Sansa Clip & use that to listen to audiobooks.

 

[Indigoquilter]

I did that a few years ago, and it started refusing to play ball about six months ago. Plus you can't refind your place if you lose it, and it wasn't good at keeping my place in more than one book at once - or even in one book at once, come to that. Then there was the fun and games when I would transfer files over and it would pretend they weren't there at all.

I just spent ?200 on this tablet, I do expect it to function correctly. I found a file converter and tried converting some files from .mp3 to .wav, and it seems to be accepting them. Does anyone know why this might be the case? The sound quality was possibly worse, though it's hard to tell as it wasn't that good a recording to begin with.