wrhn

Recent submissions

Comment · 10 months ago
There's a really awesome site called Librivox [1], where volunteers narrate books that are in the public domain. Those recordings are also in the public domain as well (this is just part of the Librivox thing). The quality of those recordings (both the narration, and the actual recording quality) varies quite a bit and most of them aren't at a quality I'd expect people to pay for and thus aren't useable for me. I've spent hours and hours sorting through those recordings finding the best ones (from a narration perspective) and then improving the recording/audio quality on them. Those recordings have all mostly been made in the last 20yrs, so they're not old recordings of the books. So, the value I add to the Librivox recordings are: curation/selection, audio enhancement, and a much better delivery mechanism (IMHO).

I'm also simultaneously building out our own library of original audio content by working with voice actors to get them recorded and proof read (this is a very expensive and time consuming process, but also very fun). One of the hardest parts is honestly the proofing process. Once I get finished narration files I have to compare them result with the actual script (as there are always mistakes) and request edits. I use whisper.cpp to transcribe them and then git and a few other scripts to compare the transcript with the actual book text.

I'll also add that I _do not_ use AI Audio narration because it just doesn't sound good IMHO, and I personally hate listening to it. I regularly run experiments to see what the current state of the tech is and it's still pretty far from where it needs to be IMO. I also don't love the idea of AI swallowing absolutely everything.

I appreciate the feedback and compliment!

[1] https://librivox.org/

Comment · 10 months ago
Since there's been a reasonable amount of traffic due to this comment, I thought I'd leave a 50% coupon ($11.75 for yr one) for HN folks in case anyone is interested:

http://app.soundreads.io/purchase/annual?prefilled_promo_cod...

Comment · 10 months ago
I just updated the home page (main nav & body content) to add a "Browse All Books" button that takes you into the app to view the current titles. Appreciate the feedback.
Comment · 10 months ago
Thanks for the feedback!

Do you think adding a button to the homepage/marketing page that says something to the effect of "See all our content" that redirected you here:

https://app.soundreads.io/

Do you think that would do the trick?

Comment · 10 months ago
All the audio is by real humans but I definitely use AI help on the descriptions and images, as graphic design and copywriting are not areas I’m competent in, and as a side gig currently I only have so much time.

A good chunk of the initial audio has been curated and re-engineered/enhanced from librivox, however I’m also working with voice actors to produce originals. For instance I just release A Christmas Carol which is original to our platform (also see Metamorphosis and Alice and Wonderland). More are coming every month but it takes time to develop real audio recordings with humans.

I appreciate your constructive feedback and welcome more!

Comment · 10 months ago
https://soundreads.io/

An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain.

I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering.

One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare it with the original [2] and let me know what you think.

[1] https://app.soundreads.io/discover/item/war-of-the-worlds [2] https://archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast...

Comment · 1 year ago
Thank you, and thanks for the comment!

Currently I have around 20 books with plans on releasing 1 a month (hopefully more). Have several in production right now and several in the bag ready to release over the first several months.

I literally just went live with some podcast adverts a week ago, so I only have 2 subscribers thus far :) so not much in the way of voting. It’s also limited to a preselected set of books (https://www.soundreads.io/voting).

If you’re interested in giving me any feedback on the selection, quality and app, I’d be happy to give you a 6mo trial (I can figure out a way of doing it that doesn’t require a CC or anything).

Thanks again for the comment.

Comment · 1 year ago
Coincidentally, I posted a somewhat related Show HN yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45657083

Crossover is that some of what we’ve done is curate some of the best librivox titles and enhance their audio quality.

Comment · 1 year ago
You mentioned readium in one of your comments. I’m curious why you didn’t use the readium spec and corresponding ecosystem. Coming in cold and just glanced at your blog post, and I see you’re using RN. There is a RN package that leverages readium under the hood for ebook reading (I know because I’m the author), don’t know if it’s a weird actually has the api you need.

EDIT: storyteller is super interesting. Dug around a bit in the code and see that you do seem to be using readium for some things, so I must just be missing some nuance.

Comment · 2 years ago
In my case (and I suspect many others) the answer is Xcode. I develop native apps which means I need access to an iOS dev environment. iOS development is nearly impossible without Xcode, so the only way to do it is either pay a virtualization penalty (which is not appealing when Xcode builds already take a massive amount of time), have a specific machine just for iOS work (which would be super inconvenient, even with a virtual KVM), use a Hackintosh (which have problems), or pay Apples exorbitant fees for hardware.

I dream of a day when I can daily drive Linux and also do dev on iOS, but currently that’s not really possible without some unacceptable compromise. I’ve done quite a bit of research and have yet to find a viable solution (recommendations welcome).

Comment · 3 years ago
Despite its many flaws, I use Plex as the single place for all my video and audio content. If you pay for the lifetime pass, you get access to an app called Plexamp which is designed for playing back audio.

Cancel your subscription, download all your books from audible, put them on a NAS, run Plex, and use Plexamp for access.

I still buy things via Audible, I just immediately download them and load them into my Plex server.

Comment · 3 years ago
If you haven’t already, you should check out MakeMKV.

You can buy it or use it free with the beta keys, and it should solve your problem.

https://makemkv.com/

Comment · 3 years ago
We’ve built a similar pipeline architecture for our product. One key thing I’ll mention is that we’re using Shaka-streamer which is a python wrapper around Shaka-packager (which in turn is a wrapper around ffmpeg). We queue our transcode jobs into a redis queue, and use k8s to scale the transcode workers based on queue volume. Lastly, as a few folks have mentioned, we have an experimental on-prem transcoding cluster with consumer grade HW that is pretty cheap.

If you’re interested in working on transcoding I’d highly recommend taking a look at Shaka-packager/streamer.

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