Today I learned

14278 readers

8 users here now

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

sonder@lemmy.ml

TIL about abogen. A tool to generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text with synchronized captions. (github.com)

submitted 7 months ago by PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com to c/todayilearned@lemmy.ml

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Has anyone tried it out? Seems amazing.

[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

i'm curious to see how much it mispronounces words like earlier iterations from different projects did.

[–] ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 7 months ago

I’d honestly probably be less annoyed by a machine mispronouncing words than I am when a human reader does it..

I know I shouldn’t be annoyed because language is difficult and not everyone has heard every word.. but you’d think they would, like, check instead of saying something wrong 1,000 times (especially since the books I listen to are mostly science communication and science history)

[–] tunetardis@piefed.ca 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I installed it yesterday and started having it chug through the Murderbot series I got in epub format. It seemed to be taking forever, but then I checked a system monitor and discovered it was using the GPU to do most of the work. So whenever my GPU-heavy screen saver kicked in, it slowed to a crawl.

At any rate, it was done this morning but then I forgot to bring the files to work, so I can't say at this point how good a job it did? It was a bit of a pain to install because it needed Python 12 and wouldn't accept Python 14 for some reason, and pyenv on my Mac is a bit of pain because it hates tkinter. Go figure. But I got it working in the end.

[–] tunetardis@piefed.ca 0 points 7 months ago

A little follow-up on this. Tonight I had a look at what it generated. It produced 2 files: a .wav and a .ass. The latter apparently contains subtitles that sync to the audio. But how do you play them together?

After searching around online, the general consensus seemed that you need to make a video file that throws it all together. For the background image I used a still of the book cover art. Then I ran an ffmpeg command that looked something like this:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i cover.jpg -i abogen_file.wav -vf subtitles=abogen_file.ass -shortest audio_book.mov

It sounds pretty awesome and looks like this while it's playing!