Backstory

I like listening to well-known stories when I fall asleep, and one of my favorite collections is the Sherlock Holmes stories as read by David Clarke on Librivox. I used to listen to them on the Librivox app on iOS and then Android, but I ran into several problems:

• I wanted it to play a random story, which the app couldn't do.
• I would often leave it on all night, and wake up to a different story. However there are some Holmes stories I find disturbing for bedtime, like "The Five Orange Pips" or "The Speckled Band".
• The Librivox app on Android in particular requires too many clicks.

This app

This app has a list of stories from the Adventures, Memoirs, and Return of Sherlock Holmes plus His Last Bow, with my few nonfavorites separated off towards the bottom. I can click on any story title to play it directly from Librivox, or press the + button next to the title to add it to the playlist. I can also press the "Random" button to select a random story from the list, or "Shuffle" to add a shuffled list of all the stories to the playlist.

There are a few stories, like "The Priory School", that come in two parts; the player should combine them and play Part II directly after Part I. The two-part stories are marked with an * at the end.

Modifying the code

I have aspirations of making this a bit more generic, usable for other collections of stories. If you'd like to adapt it, here is a bit of an explainer of the structure:

• index.js is the main code. It should largely stay the same, except for the first line.
• Holmes/holmes.js defines a class called Source which is used to define a particular list of stories. It returns a list of Sources called sources. It parses Holmes/list.js to produce this.
• Holmes/list.js is the list of stories imported by Holmes/holmes.js. It exports one list for each collection, starting with the URL pattern pointing to the stories (with an @ in them which is replaced by the number of story), followed by the titles of the stories. The first character in each name is either a * if it is a normal story, a - if it is a "disturbing" story, and ^ if it is the second part of the story listed above it.

Anyway, hope you like it. Drop me a line if you have suggestions, if you'd like a version for a different story collection, or just generally if you find this interesting at all. :)