Nicely spoken

NIV AUDIO BIBLE APP
iOS only
Aimer Media Ltd
£19.99 with audio files (£2.99 without)

I’ve been road-testing both versions of the new NIV audio Bible app sold by Hodder Faith. This app is designed to accompany the excellent audio Bible narrated by David Suchet.

This is not the place to review that particular resource – you can read my review of NIV Bible: The Gospels in the February 2014 issue of en, which was released before the whole Bible project was complete – other than to say his reading style is quite superb (apart from his quirky pronunciation of ‘Colossians’!). In terms of audio Bibles there’s nothing else quite in this league.

The iOS app (Hodder tell me an Android version may be released in the future) marries the NIV text with some additional functionality. More of that in a moment. If you already have the NIV audio Bible on your device (either downloaded direct or uploaded from the CDs) then the cheaper £2.99 app is for you. Wonderfully, this automatically senses whether you have the audio files and then links them through on installation, a process which worked perfectly for me. The more expensive version (£19.99) contains all the audio files, but otherwise has exactly the same functionality. Just beware, in terms of installation, that you should expect to use 1.4Gb for the full version and 207Mb for the smaller version (though this requires the audio files which, bizarrely, are 2.3Gb on my phone).

Some good features

So what do you get? At its most basic you get the NIV 2011 text linked through to David Suchet’s excellent audio. This is a useful resource on its own. However, there is more. The text display functions are – to my mind at least – very useful. You can, for example, turn off verse and chapter numbers, making a more true-to-life reading experience (something I happily recommend; the app calls this ‘reading view’). There are also other text features that you’ll find in other Bible apps (red letter text on or off and so on).

There is also a powerful function allowing you to add comments and bookmarks to the text – useful, for example, if you make sermon notes. If you have other Bible apps, you will get the same functionality there; so I consider this therefore a useful rather than a stand-out tool.

Text and audio

However, it is in the synchronisation between text and audio that this app really does stand out. This is what makes it a winner for me. In my Bible-in-a-year reading, for example, it’s helpful to ring the changes by listening, not just reading. In our small groups where we’re reading through the New Testament together, it makes a change to have one of Paul’s letters read to us, rather than us stumbling through the text.

I’m a big fan of the NIV audio Bible and this excellent, clean app has just made it better and more easily accessible. I am very happy to recommend it wholeheartedly.