I think the secret sauce of network based audio server is streaming and whatever bag of tricks to smooth out perceived latency and fault tolerance. This can also mean pairing it with a nice client. I mean, you can just serve mp3 files over HTTP. The browser can download the whole file, and load it until whatever mp3 playing library there is. This is exactly what I did for my first personal project that landed me an i…
Agree - audioserve is now handling this with quite simple trick - just cache ahead couple of tracks/files from current folder (aka audiobook), so responsibility is move to client.
Surprisingly this simple trick did work for me for years (as I'm intensive user of audioserve). It kind of depends on file/chapter duration - but for most common cases - which are beetween 5 mins to say 90 mins it did work fine.
Historically only Android client was using this caching, but with new web client https://github.com/izderadicka/audioserve-web and broad Service Worker support in browsers it is also available in browser.