We’ve tirelessly continued to investigate ways to help those customers regain full access. Our tech team have tried several solutions during this last week, but unfortunately, these have not met with success. Their work is continuing behind the scenes, but we are very much concerned that a number of our customers are still understandably frustrated at not being able to pull their full libraries down onto the listening App.

There is a workaround that customers can perform, but it is admittedly an inelegant solution, even though it works. We thought it best to offer this to customers while work on a more permanent solution is ongoing.

This solution requires ‘large library’ customers to temporarily ‘shrink down’ their library within their website accounts using the ‘Hide This’ function, thereby enabling the App to ‘sync-up’ with your account, without your device ‘timing out’. The upside to this is that each customer can decide for themselves which items to temporarily ‘Hide’. The downside is that it does require a time commitment from each ‘large library’ customer, and it must be done on the website – which we appreciate can be a challenge if you have accessibility issues, or don’t have easy access to a laptop or desktop computer.

But customer feedback since the 15th has shown that the majority of ‘large library’ holders want a solution to the issue as soon as possible, even if it is not a perfect one. Here’s the process:

1. Log in to your account on the website (https://www.bigfinish.com/), and then enter your account by clicking on ‘(Your Name’s) Account’. Use the email address and password which you used to access your account before July 30th – if you can’t remember the password, you’ll need to reset it: https://www.bigfinish.com/customers/forgotten_password. New passwords should be at least 8 characters long, and must include at least one number, one upper and one lower case character.

2. On the next page, scroll down until you reach the Sort/Filter Options. Set them to: All Ranges, Release Date Newest-Oldest, Out Now, All Collections, All Types, Show All, and then click Filter Now. This should then give you a result at the top of the Sort/Filter section which says something like ‘Showing 50 of xxxx available downloads’. That ‘xxxx’ is likely a number between 550-2,500, and the goal is to get it down to 500.

3. Now, think about your library – what do you have the most of? What would you be happy to temporarily Hide in order to get App access again? Perhaps you have a lot of very old purchases. In that case, change the Second Filter from ‘Release Date Newest-Oldest’ to ‘Purchase Date Oldest-Newest’ and click on ‘Filter Now’. That will put your oldest purchases at the top of the list. Or perhaps you have all of the Short Trips releases. Type ‘short trips’ into the free text search field and click on ‘Filter Now’ to reveal them. Or perhaps you have a lot of Benny Summerfield single releases, free excerpts or podcasts – again, use the free text search field to find them.

3. Once you have pulled up items you are happy to consider temporarily Hiding, you will need to Hide each one individually. For each item, click on ‘Hide This’, below the thumbnail image of the item. You may get a drop-down window at the top of the screen asking you if you’re sure you want to Hide it – click on ‘OK’.

4. Continue in this manner (steps 3-4) until you get to 500 items.

5. Next, go to the ‘white on blue’ App (check the small print within the Settings within the App to make sure you’re on the most recent version - 2.6.6 in Apple, and 20199 in Android).

6. If you’ve never logged out of it since the end of July, you *might* be able to do the following without signing out of the App – or you might not. (And yes, if you have to sign-out, this will mean that anything you have downloaded to your device in the past will be deleted from the App, but not lost from your account.)

7. Navigate to your ‘Purchased List’ – depending on what you’ve done over the last few days, it might have some titles in it, or it might be blank and say ‘no purchased audiobooks’. Swipe down on this screen (you may want to first set your phone/device to ensure it doesn’t ‘time out’ while you’re doing this).

8. This should populate your Purchased List with the 500 titles you left ‘visible’ within your account on the website. Please give it some time, and don’t swipe down more than once!

Please note the actual file size of an item doesn't matter in terms of ‘shrinking’ your library; an item is an item is an item, whether it’s a 4 disc ‘box set’ or a 10 minute free promo.

This is just a temporary measure – you don’t need to keep all those Hidden Items hidden in order to access your library via the App! Over the next few weeks, you can use the following method to reveal those Hidden items and have them appear in your App’s Purchased list:

1. Within your account on the website, change the last filter from ‘Show All’ to ‘Show Hidden’. You can also then use the other filters as before to help you ID Hidden items more quickly.

2. For each title you want to Unhide, click on ‘Unhide This’, under the thumbnail image. You may get a drop down window asking you if you’re sure you want to hide that item (yes, that’s a typo! It should say ‘unhide’.) Just click ‘OK’.

3. Once you’ve ‘Unhid’ a selection of titles – we recommend starting small, 2-5 titles at a time – go back to the App and swipe down on the Purchased list to reveal them (remember they will sort in whatever way you’ve set your App to sort).

We do not recommend using the Unhide All option as part of this re-sync process.
Please note that from this point, the ‘white on black’ App has been ‘mothballed’ – it won’t work properly.

Also note that the blue-on-white App, as has been the case for quite a while, requires iOS 12 or above to work properly on Apple, or Android 8 or above on Android.

We’re as confident as we can be at this point that this will resolve the ‘large library’ issue for our loyal customers (it’s been tested with a variety of ‘large library’ customers), and we again thank them for their patience and understanding. If this method doesn’t work for you, please try it again at a different time, and/or try shrinking your library to 400 items, before contacting enquiries@bigfinish.com.