Ability to control the pause between chapters

[maxpatiiuk]

Feature request

The player makes a pause between the chapters. I wish to have a way to reduce OR disable that pause. My use case for the BookPlayer involves converting web pages to audio files, so there are a lot of small chapters, and a 5s pause between each is annoying.

Narrative

GIVEN: Player is not on the last chapter WHEN: Chapter ended THEN: Next chapter should start without a delay OR with a shorter delay OR with a user-configurable delay

If you are open to the idea, I can work on a pull request for this

[harrisi]

I like this suggestion, but I don't know if this is a BookPlayer issue. If you download a file from LibriVox, for example, it will have five seconds of silence on the end (depending on length, I think). I double checked a couple files in Audacity just to be sure.

How are you generating the audio files? It may be that whatever tool you're using adds five seconds of silence at the end of the file. This is a really neat use case, would love to know more! :)

[maxpatiiuk]

How are you generating the audio files?

I am using the macOS's native say command line utility (it converts text to speech using Siri's voice or any other high quality voice).

It may be that whatever tool you're using adds five seconds of silence at the end of the file.

Oh, that is probably it. I should have checked that first 🤦‍♂️. say doesn't give me much options, so I might have to write a script to trim each file manually. Maybe BookPlayer could trim silences at the start and end of chapter? 🥺

This is a really neat use case, would love to know more! :)

I like consuming content as audio as much as possible because it's way faster than reading and you can listen while doing something else (walking, eating, going to sleep, or even showering), and you eyes don't get tired.

I have a browser extension that converts a webpage to text (DOM Distiller Reading Mode is the main one, but when that fails to parse page properly, I fallback to Text mode for websites - ReadBee).

Then I save that into a text file. Do that for a lot of pages until the text file grows to be ~25 MB in size (takes about 2-4 months). Then I ran that text through a script that does preprocessing (removes ads, spam, and non-text lines - more details).

Then the script splits the text file into smaller files (because macOS's say utility can only take up to 65kb of text in one go - it just ignores text if you give it more than that), and then run each text file though say (more details on the workflow). This generally takes about ~48 hours to run (but it's in the background so doesn't bother me much, though I do need to install an app to prevent my mac from going to sleep - otherwise say get's stuck).

~25MB of text translates to about 360 hours of audio at x1 speed. Though I usually listen at x3-x4, so is more like 100 hours - which takes me 3-4 weeks to get though. That is equivalent to 200-400 pages per day.

Allows me to keep up with a bunch of newsletters, read latest industry news, and consume educational content at an unprecedented pace, without getting in a way of normal activities like work and personal projects

[GianniCarlo]

@maxxxxxdlp that's really impressive, I think at some point I tried out enabling VoiceOver and going through news articles with it, but I still had to be with my phone on hand to move on to the next block of text

Regarding trimming silences, at some point I started looking into this, but it requires using a lower level api (AVAudioEngine), as the AVPlayer does not provide a way out of the box to modify an audio source playing in that way, and getting into lower level apis is usually harder, as there are less guides about them, and more domain knowledge required of how things work, but it's definitely something that would be cool (and useful) to have, it's just on a low priority list on my end for the time being

[maxpatiiuk]

No problem. I should be able to solve this on my end by trimming the audio files. https://github.com/TortugaPower/BookPlayer/issues/1005 is a larger annoyance though (and hopefully won't require low level APIs)

Thanks for creating BookPlayer!