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Re: Request for comments / suggestions

Good Morning John,

Have you investigated video subtitling software? They allow the playing of media, with the option to enter text, which is stored in a subtitle file (human readable time stamped text). The ones I've used allow for back up to re-play a bit to allow the text to be correctly typed, and timestamp to be precise.

It sounds like your goal is to add a parallel source to the video/audio, ie your book, and to index position in text to position in time.

Packages seem to come and go. A quick search shows the following on Gentoo

aegisub (I've used this) - https://github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub
gaupol - https://github.com/otsaloma/gaupol
subtitlecomposer - https://subtitlecomposer.kde.org/
subtitleeditor - https://github.com/kitone/subtitleeditor

Tug

On 1/14/25 12:21, Nash JC - NCF via linux wrote:
Hi,

Most of you know I've been playing around with TTS for creation of audiobooks. I've have VERY positive reaction from a blind friend to works she's "read" (listened to). Some stuff at https://web.ncf.ca/nashjc/novels/ in mp3-audio and m4b-audio directories. I'd aim for m4b, but CNIB members mostly have mp3 players at the moment.

I've a chance to get a student editor to try out read-along gathering of infelicities in the audio. For example, Rideau gets read as "Ride Oh". Lots of proper name glitches. And homographs like "read" (present tense) and "read" (past tense)
get fouled up.

I'm thinking of trying to cobble together a tools to allow read-along with note taking. The main issues are avoiding having to change focus from player to e-book displayer to note-taking editor. However, if I can somehow communicate keyboard shortcuts or mouse button clicks from a single interface, I'll try to avoid fully custom application.

My draft spec is below.  FWIW, I've been documenting some of my work on https://github.com/nashjc/audiobook-notes

Cheers, John Nash

Design for tool needed to allow for “editing” of audiobooks.

Current specification calls only for making notes while read-along listening. I want as much as possible to use existing programs or code chunks, and for the moment will restrict to Linux.

1) Create (with GUI dialog) a “project profile”
- text file (already converted epub probably simplest so plain text can be used) - audio file(s)  (maybe restrict to mp3 for now), in sequence. May want to start with just 1, and divide the text accordingly.
- Notes-log location
- Other stuff (date, time, user(s))
- Back and Forward steps

2) Main application
- present a control dialog: Positioning of “play” and “read” separately before start. - Start play. Want keyboard shortcuts for Play/Resume, Back, Forward, Pause, Exit of player, Up and Down in reader. Can we use numeric pad codes for this, leaving main keyboard free for notes. - Control to Insert note, Edit note, Leave note. For starters, put notes on lines or with paragraphs rather than insist on exact position. Can we capture timestamp for notes from player and auto-insert them.
- Initially use text editor to clean up Note-log.

3) Can think of many ideas to streamline above, but believe simplicity at first will give more chance to decide what works and what doesn’t.

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