- This program is written in Python and is using UnrealSpeech under the hood for TTS.
- Check out an audio sample of a paragraph to see the quality of audio.
- Converts text files into OGG audiobook.
- Bakes metatags and cover image to OGG file.
- Has a really awesome reading voice provided by UnrealSpeech.
Program uses virtual environments so make sure that you have Python, Pip and virtual environments installed properly.
On macOS you will need brew.sh installed.
- SoX - Sound eXchange
- On Debian-like systems -
sudo apt install sox
- On macOS -
brew install sox
- On Debian-like systems -
- Vorbis tools
- On Debian-like systems -
sudo apt install vorbis-tools
- On macOS -
brew install vorbis-tools
- On Debian-like systems -
- Then follow instructions below.
git clone [email protected]:mitjafelicijan/abtts.git
cd abtts
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Creating audiobooks is a two step process. First you prepare an audiobook and then you export it.
Pre-requirements:
- First you need to create UnrealSpeech account.
- Create an API Token and store it somewhere safe. You will need it for this.
- Generate first book that is provided with this repository. Use the API token
in
US_BEARER
environment variable like in example below. - Be sure you are in Python virtual environment.
To see all the options you can do python abtts.py --help
.
This example book was taken from Standard Ebooks. They have an amazing assortment of books. You should definitely check them out. All of their material is available on GitHub as well.
- This will parse TOC file and call TTS API and generate a bunch of WAV files
for each paragraphs from the book in the
out
directory (provided you didn't mess withOUT_DIR
variable). Mind the--prepare
flag. - A JSON report file will also be generated in the
out
directory for you so you can see if all went well. - If by any chance this fails for a paragraph with 500 code you can execute the command again and it will skip already existing and generated paragraphs. Sometimes UnrealSpeech API can behave badly so don't worry about it and just re-run the script.
US_BEARER="CW5RhoOX..." python3 abtts.py --book=books/armageddon-2419/ --prepare
- This is a simpler process which combines all the WAV files that were outcome from prepare procedure and generates one WAV file.
- Then encoding happens where this WAV file is encoded to OGG file. This may take some time. These files can get gigabytes in size. Be patient.
- After that metatags and book cover are embedded in OGG file.
- Mind the
--export
flag.
US_BEARER="CW5RhoOX..." python3 abtts.py --book=books/armageddon-2419/ --export
Environmental variables can prefix python command like in the example above with
US_BEARER
.
Variable | Default value | Description |
---|---|---|
TMP_DIR | tmp/ | Paragraph WAV's files are put here |
OUT_DIR | out/ | Final audiobook location |
US_BEARER | None | Bearer token for UnrealSpeech |
US_VOICE_ID | male-4 | Selected voice ID (male-0..male-4) |
START_END_SILENCE | 2000 | How many seconds get added at beginning and end |
- Books have a specific filesystem structure. Each book needs to have
toc.txt
file and cover image in the same directory. - Each book should have it's own directory to itself. Do not mix and match multiple books together.
- Books should be split into chapters, but also only one chapter is sufficient.
And example of a TOC file (toc.txt
).
-- title: Armageddon 2419 A.D.
-- author: Philip Francis Nowlan
-- year: 1929
-- cover: cover.jpg
-- words: 27337
-- length: 1 hour 40 minutes
# foreword.txt
chapter1.txt
chapter2.txt
chapter3.txt
chapter4.txt
- Chapter files like
chapter1.txt
must be all in the same folder astoc.txt
. - You can comment lines if you want with
#
. These files will be omitted. - Lines starting with
--
are special meta tags and ( author, year, cover, words, length) are all required. They can be empty, but they must be provided. - Title (
title
) tag must not be empty. Filenames get generated from this value so make sure this tag is populated. - Cover images are baked into the OGG file. Cover image MUST be a JPEG.
- Armageddon 2419 A.D., Philip Francis Nowlan, 1929
- Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott, 1884
- The Airlords of Han, Philip Francis Nowlan, 1929
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
- The Time Machine, H. G. Wells, 1895
- https://github.com/psf/requests
- https://github.com/quodlibet/mutagen
- https://github.com/un33k/python-slugify
abtts was written by Mitja Felicijan and is released under the BSD two-clause license, see the LICENSE file for more information.