syncabook VS tools

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.

This violates the "One Tool" constraint that OP requested, but the Standard Ebooks tool chain is available on Github for anyone interested: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools

The code is GPL-3 and the templates are CC0: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/blob/master/LICENSE....

Feel free to ask on the mailing list if you have any questions, more likely to be picked up there than in a random HN thread :)

I'll give a shoutout to some other excellent software.

The first is the "Standard Ebooks"[1] toolset, which is a suite of Python scripts to create, process, and build ebooks in all common formats. The results on the Standard Ebooks site speak for themselves. They're impeccable in every way, and far better than many big name, commercially produced efforts.

GitHub: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools

This question comes up a lot. The source to our production pipeline is GPLed and freely available,[1] but the biggest part of why we produce good work is that we have a high quality manual of style.[2] Unfortunately, that second part is very specific to English, and that’s the difficult part to replicate for other languages.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/

[2] https://standardebooks.org/manual/