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Free public domain audiobooks

librivox.org

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Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#21

Post by colechristensen »

primaryobjects wrote: post #8
JZL003 wrote: post #5

For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM. It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be profess…

iPhone users can enable Spoken Content. Open an ebook. Swipe down with two fingers. Instant audio book. Also, you can select the Voices option (under Spoken Content) to download high quality Siri voices.

Thank you for the suggestion. I had been using Voice Over which is a very similar feature but not quite as good for reading ebooks and the like.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#22

Post by badguybeetle »

primaryobjects wrote: post #8
JZL003 wrote: post #5

For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM. It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be profess…

iPhone users can enable Spoken Content. Open an ebook. Swipe down with two fingers. Instant audio book. Also, you can select the Voices option (under Spoken Content) to download high quality Siri voices.

i am unable to do this on my iPhone do i need to enable it in the settings.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#25

Post by FloatArtifact »

FloatArtifact wrote: post #24

The the text to speech market is so suppressed. I've seen some amazing demos but nothing that comes out and open source or consumer markets outside of Amazon and other big players.

For text-to-speech services such as Google or Amazon it costs more (end user perspective) to process audiobooks from eBooks. Compared to buy the audiobook through a subscription service.

Deep fakes audio sounds better than most text to speech models that are freely available.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#26

Post by BitwiseFool »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #15

I have been working on remastering some audiobooks from there, once I got more books done, I will have a proper section for people to download them for free from my website (direct links from the listing, no bs). Remastering as in removing background noise, EQing, compression and normalization of audio levels and reducing the librivox intro to the start of the audiobook only, rather than annoying people every chapter…

I'm grateful that you're willing to do so much work for free. Kudos!

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#29

Post by throwaway984393 »

Can anyone recommend a microphone / audio setup for recording audio books? I'd like to record some and I want to avoid the quality problems some Librivox recordings have.

Actually, more important: is there an app that makes recording audio books easier? Like, can I record in one shot, and mark places I want to cut out so I can just re-speak one passage, and later on it'll automatically be cut together like I want? I could probably jury-rig some keyboard-based app to do it...

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#30

Post by themodelplumber »

hidden-spyder wrote: post #10

Any Android app recommendations that let me access LibriVox contents?

Archive.org has a pretty easy interface. I prefer it over the Android apps I've tried, because I can easily move to desktop using synced browser data, or send books to other devices. Example:

https://archive.org/details/scaramouche_gm_librivox/

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