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

https://github.com/denizsafak/abogen

74 points · 10 comments · view on lemmy.world

10 Comments

Shepy@feddit.uk · 6 pts · 289d

This is incredible, thank you very much !

reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 289d (7 replies)

Has anyone tried it out? Seems amazing.

eldavi@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 289d (1 reply)

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

ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 288d

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 · 2 pts · 289d (4 replies)

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 · 2 pts · 288d (1 reply)

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!

bUtdFKluimxbNPg.jpg

CagedDingo@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 287d

If you use VLC or some other capable player it'll automatically pick up the subtitles if they have the same name (sans extension).

CagedDingo@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 287d

Are you from the distant future? I have never heard anyone call Python 3.12 just Python 12.

Sims@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 287d

whenever my GPU-heavy screen saver kicked in

So, a combined "Screen-saver" / "GPU-murderer" ? Neat - we can't save everyone ! ;-)

ExperiencedWinter@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 288d

If you're looking for an alternative that doesn't use generated audio https://gitlab.com/storyteller-platform/storyteller is an awesome project to generate ebooks with synchronized captions from a normal epub + audiobook input.