This time I am relying on something which is linux at heart but not quite the full fledged dekstops and its softwares that I have been dwelling in for a long time now. Android as a platform has come a long way and has a plethora of applications which rival desktop apps in terms of productivity and getting things done, if I can say so! Imagine how useful your smartphone apps would be when you dont have a linux laptop handy right away! And yep let’s not forget, Android still has its roots in linux. The following post details how I was able to get what I wanted to do, with handful of free android applications at hand. Sure it took some creative thinking to mix and match the use of these applications to achieve the desired result. So let’s get started.
As the title suggests, I got curious with audiobooks and wondered if it were possible to create one on my own. I stumbled on information about online applications which can read out a bunch of web pages. Text to speech isn’t a new technology and has been evolving well overtime. Android has a lot of free applications which will read out text or webpages. I kept trying a couple of them to understand how they work and what features they provide. I soon discovered that it is very easy to get this to work to my benefit. The application which I used here is “@Voice Read Aloud” which uses the default text-to-speech (TTS) engine in the phone to read out a text or webpage. It also has the feature to record the sound file which generates a .OGG file (an open format) of the contents of the text. A few trials gave me something which was workable but not really pleasant to listen to. The synthetic voice was choppy and generating an mp3 file wasnt really an option with the software. The reason being they want to use open file formats and avoid using any code protected by software patents, which I think is a reasonable explaination.
Regarding the choppy synthetic voice, I googled some more and found that you can install additional TTS engines on your phone and use them to read out text. “IVONA text to speech” is one such engine. It has a range of natural voices with different accents which make the converted audio very fluent and deceptively human. English language is available in the US, UK and Australian accent. After hearing the samples I settled for the UK accent which felt more natural than the others. Installed the UK english voice and set it as default TTS engine on my phone.
Going back to the “@Voice Read Aloud”, I regenerated the audio file. It took some more tweaking in the settings to get the voice sound almost human. Pauses between sentences and delays when reading a paragraph make the synthetic voice deceptively human. That the application could generate OGG files only bugged me a bit. I would have loved if the output would be in mp3, which was more common.
Format conversion of audio file isn’t much of a trouble for android. There are several applications to help with that. “Media Converter” on android does this job well and flawlessly. Now I had an mp3 audio, but when playing it in the audio player it didnt show up any information about the content being played. The reason being the generated mp3 file does not have any id3 tag information. This can be easily added using any id tag editor. ID3 tag editors can also conviniently add an album art to the file. The id information as well as the album art will get embedded in the mp3 file and will show up the next time you play it anywhere. “Star Music Tag editor” gave me this functionality with ease and within few minutes I had an annotated mp3 file with an album cover of my choice. As for the image, I was able to edit, crop and add text to it quickly on a smartphone app as well.
There you go, with some creative use of these applications I was able to create an mp3 file of one of my blogs, tagged it with relevant details and embedded an album art edited on the phone itself. The results are beyond my expectations and the free softwares available on Android platform helped me achieve this with least efforts.
Leisure Linux 