Audiobook Factory

This is a quick hack to convert common ebook, image, and text formats into audio books. Using open source OCR and voice synthesis software. Please don't abuse or overload this test service, a giant 100+ page djvu file will destroy the server unless you specify a subset of a few pages covering a chapter.

Please be patient after pressing "Download" as it takes time to process the input and prepare a file for you. Please do not press the "Download" button repeatedly after submitting a job, this will not make anything go faster, and is likely to bring the server to a grinding halt!

A single line of text translates to about a 15-20KiB MP3 file, but the intermediate wave form held in memory is much bigger, so you can imagine massive amounts of text make the server cry. The server at the moment is Kali the vm in London (going up in the world). Someone recently uploaded a 50KiB Asimov book in plain text, which produced a 5MiB (and 25 minute long!) MP3, this is the rough upper-limit of what I want to see being uploaded. If anyone wants to offer me some uber-hosting I would be very grateful ;D

Current features include:

Various input formats and sources.
Various encoded audio outputs.
Use of completely open source technology: ImageMagick, mencoder, GOCR, DjVu-libre, xpdf, Festival, and many other command-line GNU/Linux tools.

Future features might include:

Dowload plain text file generated by backend processing as an option in the output format instead of audio.
Support for more input formats including Postscript, HTML, Word 2003 documents and all OpenOffice.org documents.
Batch ordering and processing system to let you thrash out whatever volume of data you want!
Multi-language support, problematic with current OCR & text-speech technology.
Automatic language detection and machine translation of source text before audio is generated.
Ability to choose the sex and nationality of the speakers voice, and tweak audio properties.

Create Audiobook

$/!\$ .ps .html and .doc support coming soon.

From An E-Book Or File

Upload an ebook, image, or plain-text file to the server and have it converted to audio. Currently supports the following formats: .djvu .pdf .txt and all these image formats supported by ImageMagick.
Using a format based on raster data, rather than text like many djvu files, and all image files, will require Optical Character Recognition. This is not perfect, but should still give reasonable results. In future development the postprocessing of the text generated from OCR will be improved.

Input file:

Include pages from: to: Used with PDF and DjVu only.

Encode audio as:

The information provided on this and other pages by me, Matt Oates (mattoates

gmail.com), is under my own personal responsibility and not that of Aberystwyth University or the University of Bristol. Similarly, any opinions expressed are my own and are in no way to be taken as those of either institute.