I Was Tired of Quitting Audiobooks Three Chapters In. So I Built AudioHaven.

Last summer I was eight miles into a long run when the audiobook I was loving punched me in the ear. I had been three hours into a thriller a friend swore I would not be able to put down. He was right. I could not put it down. And then I had to.

I pulled out my phone, deleted the book from my library, queued up a podcast I had already heard twice, and ran the last four miles annoyed.

It was not the first time. It was not even the first time that week.

I read or listen to about thirty books a year. I have run thousands of miles to the sound of audiobooks and podcasts. And for years, I had quietly accepted that a fair chunk of what I started, I would end up quitting. Not because the writing was bad. Not because I lost interest. Because somewhere in chapter three, or chapter eleven, or fifteen minutes into an episode I was loving, the story would do the thing that made me reach for the next title in the queue.

I am writing this now because I finally got tired of running the last four miles annoyed.

How I got here

In late 2022 I was at a job I did not like, teaching myself to code on nights and weekends. I was newly married. We were expecting our first kid. I kept starting side projects I was not actually passionate about, and abandoning them at the same point I was abandoning my audiobooks.

Somewhere in there, I picked up a piece of advice I cannot find again. It was something like: build something you actually have a problem with. Not something clever. Not something the market needs. Something you, specifically, would use every day.

I knew immediately what mine was.

The job was hard. The pregnancy was harder. Learning to code in the cracks between both was the hardest. But I had something I could not unlearn: the certainty that I wanted an audiobook app that worked the way I wished audiobooks worked.

What was already out there

If you have looked for this kind of thing, you know the landscape is thin.

VidAngel and ClearPlay have been doing content filtering for movies and TV for years. They are the reason this is legally settled, by the way. The Family Movie Act of 2005 made it explicit: you are allowed to skip content during private playback of media you own. They proved a market exists. Hundreds of thousands of video subscribers, in some cases. Real people, paying real money, every month, to skip the content they did not want in their living room.

But no one was doing this for audiobooks. And no one was doing it for podcasts at all.

I would search for “clean audiobooks” every few months hoping someone had built it. The same handful of book-review sites came up every time, helpful in a research sort of way, useless when I actually wanted to press play. There were a couple of attempts at filtering apps that had launched and stalled. None of them were what I wanted.

So I started building.

What AudioHaven actually does

AudioHaven plays audiobooks and podcasts. The free tier is a complete listener: full library, downloads, podcast subscriptions, progress sync across devices, CarPlay and Android Auto, all of it.

The paid tier does one thing the rest of the world does not. It filters content in real time during playback. You pick what you want skipped: profanity by category, sexual content by severity, violence, crude humor. The original audiobook plays normally. The player simply skips past the segments you chose to filter. Same book, same narrator, same story.

Here is the part that matters most to me, and the part I think most people do not understand about how AudioHaven works until they try it:

Every filter in AudioHaven is reviewed by a real person.

Not an algorithm. Not a model that thinks the word “shoot” might be a swear. A human being listens to the segments, decides what category they belong in, and tags exactly where they start and end. That is why our skips are clean. That is why our filtering does not chop the middle out of a normal sentence. That is why I trust the app with my own listening, and why my wife trusts it with hers.

I know there are competitors leaning into “AI does the filtering” as a feature. We made a different choice on purpose. If you are going to trust an app to decide what your kids hear, or what plays through the car speakers on a family road trip, you should know that a person stood behind every one of those decisions.

My wife

The other person who made me build this app is my wife.

She is the bigger reader of the two of us. She is the one who finishes the series I started and abandoned. She is also the one I would watch put down a book she had been excited about for weeks, because it had drifted somewhere she did not want to follow.

She was the first person I gave AudioHaven to when it was good enough to actually listen with. She picked up the third book in a series she had been wanting to finish. A few chapters in, she came and found me.

I was almost in tears I was so excited and amazed at how well the app works.

That is the moment I knew this was not just for me.

What I want this to be

I have two daughters now. The oldest is two. The youngest is brand new.

In a few years they are going to be the age where I started reading the books that shaped me. I want them to have access to those stories. I want them to read widely and listen broadly and find the books that knock them sideways the way mine knocked me sideways. I do not want to hand them a curated, sanitized, dumbed-down version of literature.

I also do not want to hand them a chapter that does not match where they are yet.

AudioHaven is the place where both of those things can be true. The original stories, in their original form, with the parts you and yours are not ready for skipped on your terms. Not someone else’s idea of what you should hear. Yours.

That is what I want this to be for you, too. Not a smaller version of the audiobook world. The same audiobook world, the way you would have built it if you had the time.

What is next

We are early. The catalog is growing. We are working with publishers and aggregators to bring you the modern bestsellers you actually want filtered, not just the public-domain classics. We are adding features the community is asking for, and we are adding them fast.

We are also asking for your help. If you start a book that needs filtering and the filters are not there yet, tell us in the app. The Report Missing Filter button is one tap. A real person sees every one of those.

If you want to try AudioHaven, the listener is free and there is a 14-day Premium trial with no credit card upfront. Start with whatever audiobook you most recently quit. See if you can finish it this time.

Get AudioHaven on the App Store

Build the listening experience my wife and I always wanted. I think you are going to love it.

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Danny