syncabook VS audiobookshelf

Amazing! I've made a similar ebooks-audiobooks aligner years ago: https://github.com/r4victor/syncabook. At that time, I chose to synthesize the text and align two audio sequences because I found texts-alignment approaches (including ML-based ones) too compute-intensive and inadequate for long texts. I see Storyteller works by aligning the texts. Could you give some view on how long it takes to sync a book?

Also, my experience was that audio and text versions are often very different (e.g. the audio having an intro missing from the text). It'd very interesting to know how well Storyteller handles such cases. Does it require manual audio/text editing or handle the differences automatically?

Unfortunaly, this audiobook isn't synchorized to the text on Kindle. So, in order to synchronize the epub and audio myself, initially, I tried using syncabook, but the results weren't great for some reason. I then tried using OpenAI's Whisper to generate the text from the audio. This might've given decent results, but ultimately I decided I wanted to keep the book's formatting (paragraphs, emphasis, etc.)

I've tried syncabook, but that didn't help. I've tried whisperX, to get word-level timings, but the results are pretty bad/unusable.

From searching a bit I found https://github.com/r4victor/syncabook this might help anyone intrigued about the idea. I suspect this is the tool you're talking about? Your post is really a long form question, and could have been a lot shorter.

This software can generate epubs with audio completely automatically for a lot of simpler languages. The problem is it doesn't support Japanese.

For anyone who's game to run another service for audiobooks, I've found Audiobookshelf to be pretty good: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf

A spotlight on AudioBookshelf, an audiobook and podcast streaming server

The basics are same across most any container, you probably need to map some network ports, and map some storage paths, and then you are pretty good to go. There can be more than that, but those are kind of the minimums. For instance, the example compose file for audiobookshelf does just that, maps a port, and some storage and that's about it.

linky: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf#readme (JS; GPLv3) and they have their own app, too: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf-app#readme (Capacitor GPLv3)

Move away as in find another audiobook vendor? Or simply retain access to your existing collection?

Audiobooks from Audible can be downloaded via the UI. They will have DRM, but it's possible to remove.

If you have audiobook files without DRM you can listen to them via any app that plays audio, but there's also at least one OSS project that aims to fill audiobook UI niche [1].

[1]: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf

Using Audiobookshelf (https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf) and hosing my own podcast with an rss feed. It works just perfect in other podcast apps but in Pocket Casts, that used to work, I can't no longer see new episodes starting from about a week ago. I have never been able to stream the episodes either, just download and listen, this also works in iOS Podcaster app.