Exporting
The conversion is the product — the last mile out of Castwright shouldn't feel like an afterthought. This screen covers every way the finished book leaves the app: a straight download, a push to a self-hosted library, a walkthrough into the audiobook app you already use, or a pairing with Castwright's own companion app.
Four top-level ways to get a finished book out: a single chaptered M4B, a zip of per-chapter MP3s, a shareable streaming link, or a full portable bundle (state, manuscript, audio, and cover together) for moving the whole project to another machine. Inside the export picker, AAC (M4A) and Opus (Ogg) are available too, for players that prefer them.
This screen leads with Castwright's own companion app — Android today, iOS at launch — above the listener-app list. Pair a device here with a QR code (or the manual code behind it) and it syncs your library over the home network, downloads books for offline listening, and remembers exactly where you left off, in a real native player with lock-screen controls and a sleep timer. If the maintainer's build has an APK ready to hand out, a Download .apk button appears right here too.
Nothing here locks you in — six listener apps get one-tap tiles, each opening the same export picker pre-filled with the right format and a few pointers for that app specifically: Audiobookshelf, BookPlayer, Smart AudioBook Player, Apple Books, PocketBook, and Voice. Any other MP3.ZIP- or chaptered-M4B-capable player works too via a manual download — you're never limited to this list.
Audiobookshelf gets the deepest integration of the six, because it's a self-hosted library server, not just a player: point it at your Audiobookshelf library folder and Castwright explains exactly what lands where — a single chaptered M4B if you want one file, or a folder of per-chapter MP3s with a metadata.json alongside them that Audiobookshelf reads directly. Either way, chapters, cover art, and series metadata arrive already tagged, so the book shows up on your shelf looking like it belongs there — below, exactly that dialog, opened from The Drowning Bell's export tile.
Every export you start is tracked here — queued, running, done, or failed, filterable by status with live counts — and it survives a reload, so kicking off a long export and closing the tab doesn't lose it. Each row carries Download, Copy link, Remove, and Retry (for a failed export, without starting over from the format picker).
Switch the export picker to "Download to phone" for a LAN URL plus a QR code — scan it with your phone's camera, no cable and no separate app required, and the file lands straight in its Downloads folder.
Screenshots of the format-tile row, the Companion banner, the export queue, and the LAN/QR tab are tracked as a follow-up (Refs #1289) — this page currently shows the Audiobookshelf dialog only, captured against the real app rather than left as a placeholder.