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Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command

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Re: Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command

#41

Post by archargelod »

C-Loftus wrote: post #40
C-Loftus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the feedback and I'm sorry you had those issues. I cannot replicate at the moment on Ubuntu 24.04 but will check back on this. I presume it is something simple going wrong with how I am getting the home directory in golang and checking if the path exists. Your feedback on ebook-convert is very valid. I can take a look at breaking it up. (Granted I am not sure how much of a lift that would be)

Issues should be fixed now in the latest release.

Can confirm that everything is fixed. Thanks for the update!

Re: Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command

#42

Post by richerram »

This is awesome, it was pretty easy to set up and start using it.

I have just one question/note to make: I tried a book in the Mexican Spanish language and noticed that it fails to catch the accents on the words (emphasis on words with tildes and strong accents on that syllable) and I am thinking it is because of the .pdf parsing since the Piper Voice Sample on their webpage example does it properly (on both avbailable voices).

Do you have an idea of what could exactly be happening and how I can try to solve it?

Thank you very much for the tool again!!!

Update: Ohh ok I just checked the repo Issues and found the one about polish accents, I tried "--speak-diacritics" but got the same "Error: failed to read file passed as input to piper: read /tmp/ebook-convert-xxxxxxx.txt file already closed". If I skip the diacritics option it converts fine.

Re: Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command

#43

Post by richerram »

richerram wrote: post #42

This is awesome, it was pretty easy to set up and start using it. I have just one question/note to make: I tried a book in the Mexican Spanish language and noticed that it fails to catch the accents on the words (emphasis on words with tildes and strong accents on that syllable) and I am thinking it is because of the .pdf parsing since the Piper Voice Sample on their webpage example does it properly (on both avbailab…

Update 2: I went to look at the code and although I have never done anything with Go I was pleased with how easy it is to read plus your code was pretty well structured.

I realized the removal of diacritics was happening at the function RemoveDiacritics inside lib/textProcessing.go on line 26 and modified the definition(?) to not modify special characters, compiled again and voila! It worked great.

After that I used Calibre to convert a couple .pdfs to .txt and with a pretty simple python script got rid of page footnotes/headers/page_numbers and I just ended up with pretty decent Audiobooks.

Thanks again for the great tool!

Re: Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command

#44

Post by TiredGuy »

biomcgary wrote: post #39

Is Piper currently the best open source TTS model? I occasionally review open models to see if they match elevenlabs and have been disappointed. However, Piper sounds better than the last time I listened around.

Listening to the piper demos [1] and comparing to coqui [2], I'd say coqui sounds better to me, but I'd love to hear others' opinions. Looks like Piper's latest commits were 3 months ago [3] while Coqui's were 8 months ago [4], so they both seem similar in recency. In terms of ease of use though, especially with this project, personally Piper seems way less overwhelming.

[1] https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ [2] https://huggingface.co/spaces/coqui/xtts [3] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper [4] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS

Re: Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command

#45

Post by andai »

C-Loftus wrote: post #29
archargelod wrote: post #22

Cool app! I've had some issues with getting it to work, though: - ebook-convert is not a small dependency, it seems that it only comes bundled with calibre software. And calibre has huge number of python dependencies (>400 packages on OpenSuse) - don't know about you, but I'm not polluting my install with that for a small tool. So, I've grabbed appimage version of calibre, extracted it and added symlink to the bundle…

Thank you for the feedback and I'm sorry you had those issues. I cannot replicate at the moment on Ubuntu 24.04 but will check back on this. I presume it is something simple going wrong with how I am getting the home directory in golang and checking if the path exists. Your feedback on ebook-convert is very valid. I can take a look at breaking it up. (Granted I am not sure how much of a lift that would be)

The intention seems to have been to skip running ebook-convert if the input file is already a text file, but it runs it anyway. So I recompiled it to not do that.

https://gist.github.com/avelican/8602b417e810f8dd4e31e8e3fbb...

...at which I did some more digging and realized that (for my purposes anyway -- operating on txt files), QPA can simply be replaced with piper itself!

    cat book.txt |  piper --model [model] --output_file book.wav
(which I found kind of funny)

Re: the ebook-convert dependency, I wonder if there are any feasible alternatives? My first thought was pandoc, which is ~140MB, but I guess that's smaller than Calibre's ~1400MB (!!!).

Re: Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command

#46

Post by lucius_verus »

TiredGuy wrote: post #44
biomcgary wrote: post #39

Is Piper currently the best open source TTS model? I occasionally review open models to see if they match elevenlabs and have been disappointed. However, Piper sounds better than the last time I listened around.

Listening to the piper demos [1] and comparing to coqui [2], I'd say coqui sounds better to me, but I'd love to hear others' opinions. Looks like Piper's latest commits were 3 months ago [3] while Coqui's were 8 months ago [4], so they both seem similar in recency. In terms of ease of use though, especially with this project, personally Piper seems way less overwhelming. [1] https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ […

For anyone who is interested, CoquiTTS (formerly, MozillaTTS) was great, but the project isn't maintained anymore (athough there's been some confusion about whether or not it's active. See: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS/issues/4022).

Looks like there's an effort to keep an actively maintained fork here, though: https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS

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