Audiobooks on the Run

Some things seem to be obvious. And they can indeed be obvious. Such as listening to an audiobook during a daily exercise run. And probably they even can be obvious to do on some platforms. I don't have an Apple watch, but I presume there is the Kindle (or Audible) app for it. So that a synced audio narration can be played via headphones connected to the watch, with no phone present. Yes, I do not carry a phone with me on my daily trail runs, but hey, all the latest generation smart watches are advertised they can play audio over Bluetooth. So why not?

Actually even for the Apple platform, the obvious part is not entirely obvious, as due to the platform restrictions you cannot "add" (purchase) a narration to a Kindle book directly on an iOS device. You need to use browser or add the narration using a non-iOS device, such as a PC or an Android phone.

This is designed to be easy:

Purchase a book -> start reading -> add narration -> switch to listening

But on iOS you neither can purchase the book (only can add to a wish list) not you can add narration (only can add to a wish list). On Android this works as intended.

Now I have found it very challenging to bring the narration to my Garmin watch. The Garmin can play audio over Bluetooth (and it pairs with Apple AirPods), so considering the Kindle (Audible) narration is audio - it should be possible to play it. And I got it running. Eventually. But it is far from obvious... 

I started by figuring out how to get the physical file (yes, the file) containing the narration. You can do this by downloading the Audible Download Manager PC program. Audible has removed it from its website, but you can find it on other mirror servers. It allows for downloading the purchased Audible content and stores it in iTunes. It puts the file in the \iTunes Music\Audiobooks\<author>\ folder, in the original AAX format.

The next step is to convert AAX to MP3. There are many converter options, I picked a very simple AaxToMp3GUI (very crude, but does the job). It takes a few minutes and you have an MP3 file, which you can then use with any MP3 player. Such as the Garmin watch: connect the watch via a USB cable and copy the file over. That is it.

As long as the Garmin behaves as advertised. Unfortunately mine did not. I could not get it to play audio and record the "activity" (the hike) at the same time. It was either playing audio and not recording the activity or recording the activity and failing to play. I think this is a resource management problem in the Garmin software. May be as simple as exhausting the RAM, as each individual function works, while together they don't want to. Finally after numerous reboots I got it working. And once it started, the experience was exactly as it should be - obvious. I had my audiobook streamed from the watch to the earphones over Bluetooth. And the watch was recording the track with all exercise parameters. 

But if it far from being obvious and simple. I don't think there are many people on this planet going that far. They probably settle with buying an armband for a phone and enjoy a one-click experience.

UX is a night and day difference and defines products today. Garmin is a great platform, hardware-wise. But the poor support for apps makes it a far less popular option for most people. It is difficult and to achieve the wanted results you may need an engineering degree.