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Making podcasts from Project Gutenberg e-books (2021)
- throwaway81523 4y agoI never understand stuff like this. The idea seems to be to run Gutenberg texts through a text to speech system so you can listen while washing dishes. Doesn't anyone read any more?
- Majestic121 4y agoWhy would it be one or the other ? There can be people consuming books through reading, audiobooks, or both. It does not matter much, except for the preference of the consumer : The thing that actually matters is the content of the book, not the channel through which it is consumed. And even if you think audiobooks are strictly inferior to reading for everyone, I'm sure you'll still agree that an audiobook is strictly superior to no audiobook, which would be the alternative in the case of people listening to audiobooks while driving/doing dishes/etc...
- _Algernon_ 4y agoThis kind of reading elitism is cringe. Books can be consumed with eyes or ears. Neither is inherently better or worse. Let others have their preferences without having to endure your elitism.
- mmcdermott 4y agoI do both, but I would argue that text has one major advantage over advantage over audio recordings: it's cheaper, which means that there are many works that don't make the jump from text to audio. Pragmatically, if you restrict what you consume to what you can get in audio, you limit what you can access. Worse still, it isn't even an equal distribution. Popular fiction tend to dominate most audiobook stores, which makes sense due to its broad appeal. It does seem like this is slowly shifting and good TTS might even make it irrelevant in the future, but for most people consuming via audio only means leaving a lot of material unavailable.
- corobo 4y agoOne person has set up a thing = none of the 7 billion people read anymore. I never understood arguments like that tbf, haha
- becquerel 4y agoPeople experienced literature orally far, far before they ever read it. Listening to stories has been the predominant experience across human history and culture.
- watwut 4y agoNot while washing dishes, no. The amount of people who want to read while washing dishes was always miniscule.
- rgoulter 4y agoThis is the fantastic thing about audio. You can listen to stuff at the same time as doing some other activity. (e.g. light exercise, or some straightforward task).
- nmarinov 4y agoI am the target audience for something like this. I like reading and do read a lot and prefer reading to listening cause for me it's much faster and with better comprehension. But after 10-12 hours of screen time, an audiobook saves my eyes and is actually easier while working out or walking on a treadmill. I'm frequently doing something similar with TTS on iOS and macOS so this would be an all around improvement.
- leobg 4y agoI can highly recommend the app “voice dream reader”. It’s the first thing I install on a new iPhone. It’s also what I use to read every interesting article that I find on HN. I even scan books simply to be able to read it in the app. Being able to switch between listening and visual reading is amazing. You can also take highlights and export them. Also, no subscription, and works offline with all data stored on your device.
- francis-io 4y agoAs someone who is neurodivergent, reading is exhausting. I like audiobooks played at 2x speed.
- AlwaysRock 4y agoWhat an odd comment. Can you read while you do the dishes? I cant. Unless I'm listening to an audiobook. I love to read. I do it in lots of formats. A significant portion of my reading comes from listening to audiobooks while doing mindless chores or driving.
- dotancohen 4y agoOr driving. I spend over an hour driving every day. That's a lot of "reading" time I otherwise wouldn't get without audiobooks.
- whatrocks 4y agoOP here. I read ALL the time. But I also do dishes. I find it hard to do dishes and read a physical book at the same time. Unless someone else was holding it up for me, slowly flipping the pages. That does sound nice.
- adolph 4y ago> Doesn't anyone read any more? Socrates faulted writing for weakening the necessity and power of memory, and for allowing the pretense of understanding, rather than true understanding. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439
- alexcg1 4y agoWhat text-to-speech model is being used? I've seen big improvements in the past few years that could make me actually want to listen to these (since the voices sound more natural now)
- Poppys 4y agoI used to rip the audio of my favourite movies and listen to them like audiobooks. Because I was usally familiar with the visual parts, I could enjoy the dialogue and the music in a different way.
- dewey 4y agoThat's a very fun idea. I'll give this a try with my favorite movie. Thanks! Update: In case someone is curious, I wrote up the steps necessary to do that with an MKV and ffmpeg: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/listening-to-a-movie-as-an-audiobook/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/listening-to-a-movie-as-an...
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- Mezzie 4y agoI frequently 'watch' TV Shows and movies by just listening to them. It's a habit I picked up as a kid since I was blind.
- notwhereyouare 4y agoprobably not legal, but this sites been around for a long while: https://www.listentoamovie.com/media/index.php https://www.listentoamovie.com/media/index.php
- dewey 4y agoObviously, I only saw this after slinging obscure FFmpeg commands for half an hour to extract a DTS audio track from a mkv and converting it to a flac file. Update: In case someone is curious, I wrote up the steps necessary to do that with an MKV and ffmpeg: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/listening-to-a-movie-as-an-audiobook/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/listening-to-a-movie-as-an...
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- ZeroGravitas 4y agoTheres's alternative YouTube clients for Android (and other platforms, apart from the great cli tools mentioned) that help with the audio-only use case that the main apps upsell mechanic breaks accidentally(?) without having to totally reroute all the content.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoVoice synthesis is obviously getting better and better, but I've wondered whether anyone has put time into the semi-manual tuning of classic texts for audiobook purposes. Kind of like what Standard Ebooks does for epub typography but for Audio. Like, can someone edit a file to add dramatic pauses, correct unusual pronunciations and so on to improve the automation? Can someone with a merely average speaking voice record the audio, to provide the human element, but then have that pacing and emphasis applied to a (or several) user controlled automated voices? Googling it, voice style transfer seems to be a thing, would be interesting to convert the librivox catalog to various celebrities and see how it works.
- desindol 4y agoAzure has really good neural voices with good ssml support. With a sentiment analyses you could probably automate it rather easy.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoSSML led me to this EPUB support for enhanced text to speech, so possibly something Standard Ebooks might actually adopt themselves in future. https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-tts-10/#ssml https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-tts-10/#ssml
- westcort 4y agoMany classic radio dramas are still very engaging, and British radio programs on archive.org are also enjoyable. I created a randomizer that plays these through my site: Classic radio: https://www.locserendipity.com/Radio.html https://www.locserendipity.com/Radio.html British radio: https://www.locserendipity.com/RadioShows.html https://www.locserendipity.com/RadioShows.html Also, this text to speech program using the built in TTS API in your browser is useful: https://www.locserendipity.com/TTS.html https://www.locserendipity.com/TTS.html As is this project Gutenberg randomizer: https://www.locserendipity.com/Gutenberg.html https://www.locserendipity.com/Gutenberg.html Enjoy!
- is_true 4y agoThere's so much spam when you search in Google Podcasts app, I guess as TTS gets cheaper is gonna get worse and worse.
- ghaff 4y agoWhether or not it's actually "spam," as TTS gets better it probably gets more tempting to create podcast feeds for articles/blogs because... why not? Even if it's not for monetization purposes.
- AlwaysRock 4y agoRight. I hadnt thought of screenplays being read as podcasts before. I know there are some screenplays from the blacklist that I WANT to sit down and read but never will. A podcast version would be great.
- is_true 4y agoI guess it would be ok if podcasts created with TTS included a badge "Automated content" and an option to filter those when you search.
- AndrewStephens 4y agoIt is a nice little project but if anyone actually wants pre-made audio versions of out-of-copyright books then I suggest looking at LibriVox[0] They have thousands of works read by volunteers (some are very good, some average) and they publish RSS feeds for collections so you can consume them with your podcast app. For example, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes[1], a dramatic reading. [0] https://librivox.org https://librivox.org [1] https://librivox.org/the-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes-version-6-dramatic-reading-by-sir-arthur-conan-doyle/ https://librivox.org/the-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes-versi...
- AlwaysRock 4y agoThe author links to Librivox at the bottom of the article...
- AndrewStephens 4y agoI guess I should have read all the way to the end. But LibriVox is such a great project that I don't regret linking to it again.
- vmilner 4y agoSee also Magpie Audio for high audio quality recordings of Holmes and others (eg Pride and Prejudice) by professional actors. (They have been put on YouTube by the main reader Greg Wayland for free - though I think he retains copyright)
- neves 4y agoA well interpreted audio book is really a enjoyable experience. Some books ask to be read aloud.
- causi 4y agoI find it quite interesting that his final voice sounds exactly like a female speaker standing at a podium in a small auditorium, not someone speaking directly into a microphone like most TTS systems.
- vehemenz 4y agoThere are plenty of applications that read ePubs, PDFs, etc. via TTS, not to mention screen readers. Plus they are more customizable than generating a wav file.
- whatrocks 4y agoI believe I mentioned this in the article, but I really think scripts or plays would be a great medium for TTS, where you could have separate voices for each character. Could be a neat feature to add to script-writing software.
- y42 4y agoSome days ago I did something similar, I'm using Googles Text To Speech to read Wikipedia and upload it to anchor.fm. The hardest part was the wrapper for anchor.fm, because of course there is no public API documentation. The Google API indeed is a bottle neck, because it's only free within a given limit. https://anchor.fm/rakn https://anchor.fm/rakn