Music Player with Sleep Timer, Fast-Forward, Rewind

If you copy your audio files (including MP3s) to the Audiobooks/ folder on your Garmin (as opposed to the Music/ folder), they will be treated as audiobook files by your watch's built-in My Music player and will work a little differently than songs:

- playback will resume where you left off

- the controls menu will gain controls to rewind and fast forward by 30 seconds each. (If your earbuds have back/forward controls, these controls will trigger rewind and fast forward by 30 seconds, instead of the usual previous track and next track actions.)

That doesn't address your sleep timer use case, but it's not possible for a CIQ app to access audio files that you manually copied to your watch. It might be possible to write a CIQ music app that has a sleep timer, but you would have to download music through the app itself (so you'd have to set up a server to sync your own music).

StevenHB said:

I thought that I'd copied my MP3s to /Audiobooks but perhaps I didn't

Yeah, the folder categorization might be a bit finicky. I tried copying some files to the Podcasts/ folder but they ended up as regular songs. Not sure what happened differently with Audiobooks/.

I'll also note that I tried converting an MP3 file into an M3B "audiobook" file (which is apparently just a renamed M3A file, at least in some respects), but Garmin didn't seem to care about the file format - it still treated the M3B file as a song when I copied it to Podcasts/.

With your help/encouragement here, I did a bit of experimentation.

I found that I needed to update the MP3 metadata so that "Audiobook" or "Audiobooks" was the first value in the genre list of each MP3 file to ensure that Garmin Express recognizes the files properly and so that they end up in Audiobooks on the watch.

I found similar behavior with setting the genre to "Podcast"; though, I didn't try putting Podcast second as I did with Audiobook.

All of that said, the 30-seconds forward or back isn't going to meet my needs.  As I wrote above, I frequently fall asleep listening to audiobooks.  Moving through an hour of content in 30 second jumps just isn't reasonable.  Which would bring this conversation back to a dedicated app (on Android, I use "Smart Audiobook Player," which is exactly that app [for Android] and does a great job of meeting audiobook users' needs). Sadly, the Android market is vastly larger than the Garmin market.

For anyone wondering why I use audiobooks the way that I do: I find that audiobooks are particularly good at drowning out the stray thoughts that keep me awake at night ("don't forget to do x, y, and z tomorrow," "Did I receive a response to that email?" etc., etc., etc.).  When running, of course, they distract from any unpleasantness and keep me entertained.

StevenHB said:

I found that I needed to update the MP3 metadata so that "Audiobook" or "Audiobooks" was the first value in the genre list of each MP3 file to ensure that Garmin Express recognizes the files properly and so that they end up in Audiobooks on the watch.

I found similar behavior with setting the genre to "Podcast"; though, I didn't try putting Podcast second as I did with Audiobook.

Interesting. I should’ve mentioned that when I did my test, I didn’t use Garmin Express, I just copied the files directly (i.e. using File Explorer on Windows / OpenMTP on Mac).

It wouldn't surprise me if both Express and that watch itself used the MP3 metadata to categorize / help categorize music files, even if you move the files into the relevant folders directly.

Yes, but the files I copied to Audiobooks/ did not have a genre set in the metadata.