Remastering as in removing background noise, EQing, compression and normalization of audio levels and reducing the librivox intro to the start of the audiobook only, rather than annoying people every chapter.
The community has the manpower but now always the knowledge
It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be professionally narrated
And for anyone who listens to a lot of audio, I'd look into using an audio equalizer. Pulling down the high frequencies (especially for some woman narrators) makes it more comfortable after many hours of listening. On android the "Smart audiobook" app has this and it's really nice. Maybe some headphones/android phones can do this globally
I've listened to numerous books (mostly but not exclusively fiction) using TTS and I'd like to confirm this experience. It's kind of remarkable, once I became accustomed to the sound of the TTS program the weirdness just sort of evaporated and I was left with an experience that feels very similar to reading visually.
Open an ebook. Swipe down with two fingers. Instant audio book.
Also, you can select the Voices option (under Spoken Content) to download high quality Siri voices.
The comprehension of powerful ideas should be easy, effortless and intuitive. Listening to content has the double benefit of ensuring that talking about complex subjects is all the more familiar. If you've been introduced to a topic through speech, talking about it is all the more natural.
LibriVox: Free Public Domain Audiobooks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23558686 - June 2020 (81 comments)
Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104143 - Jan 2020 (84 comments)
LibriVox: free public domain audiobooks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11141452 - Feb 2016 (37 comments)
LibriVox hits 100 Million downloads, looking for a PHP Dev - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3808080 - April 2012 (9 comments)
*edit: Or check out audiobooks from your local library!
[0] https://librivox.org/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevens...
- 'Pride and Prejudice' (Austen)
- 'Sense and Sensibility' (Austen)
- 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers' (Nesbit)
- 'The Railway Children' (Nesbit)
- many others (says 141 total matches)
https://librivox.org/reader/103?primary_key=103&search_categ...
edmundkemperstories.com/blog/2019/03/09/list-of-17-books-narrated-by-edmund-kemper-for-volunteers-of-vacaville-the-blind-project-part-1-of-2/
Actually, more important: is there an app that makes recording audio books easier? Like, can I record in one shot, and mark places I want to cut out so I can just re-speak one passage, and later on it'll automatically be cut together like I want? I could probably jury-rig some keyboard-based app to do it...
Edit: Yes, apps that allow you to mark and quickly edit are common.
It's super MVP and currently uses youtube for the recordings, but it works and is entirely hosted on GitHub Pages (including user-submitted data that runs through a github action).
Deep fakes audio sounds better than most text to speech models that are freely available.
I'm on iOS and really enjoy using Overcast.
In any voice you want.