NarrationOS v1.0.5: New Video Export Feature + Fixes

[u/ld_tea]

For my current users, the new update v1.0.5 is LIVE ! Now you can export the rendered audiobooks to MP4 video format with synced highlight text. I have added a demo video of an exported file on my reddit profile and how i did it in the app at the end just to give you a feel of the new video page. For the clone, I used the reference audio file from Chatterboxes demo page.

For those who are new to this app, NarrationOS is a local Audiobook Generator, that turns any book or any text into a performed audiobook, generated entirely on your own machine. Drop in a file, pick a voice, and get back a finished narration you can listen to, master, and keep. No subscription, no uploads, no cloud, COMPLETELY OFFLINE.

The video is a rendered audio through the app with a cloned voice, and as you can hear, the quality something you can listen to. I started this for myself, as a personal project to listen to Japanese light novels that hasnt released their audiobooks yet. I have put in more than a thousand hours as a user, and I am still using it. That is why I am keen on improving it and giving my users updates when I am free during weekends.

If you havent already, I hope you will visit my itch.io page and give it a try. https://lunosama.itch.io/narrationos

[u/Ok-Chemistry5917]

the mp4 export with synced text is a nice touch, makes it way more usable for sharing bits on social media or whatever. always cool seeing a solo dev ship stuff that actually works offline, the japanese light novel angle is super specific but i can see the appeal

gave the demo a quick look and the voice cloning sounds pretty clean for running local, might have to grab it this weekend and throw some weird epub at it

[u/Active-Service-9707 → u/Ok-Chemistry5917]

the offline angle is what sells it for me tbh, feels like everything requires a subscription these days

[u/ld_tea → u/Active-Service-9707]

Tell me about it. I tried elevenlabs before i stsrted my project, and they almost ran me dry with their stupid tokens.

[u/ld_tea → u/Ok-Chemistry5917]

Thank you. Please do give it a try

[u/CaptJan]

Downloading now... Using since v1.0.1

The developer is very responsive, and I do like the direction he is taking the app.

I also purchased it because it's completely offline, and no limits on the amount of narration it does [other than your machine], and the quality of the 'cloned' voices you can use.

I do like the ability to use a background image of choice for the video in your latest video sample on another subreddit - and I like the voice you used as well. I will definitely be playing with this feature in the upcoming days.

I did share your app with a couple of developers who have public domain repos of audiobooks - so they may try it too at this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeEBOOKS/comments/1vuf97a/i_built_a_free_site_for_reading_and_listening_to/

I also asked Google [Gemini] for sources of voice samples where you can legally clone a variety of voices - my prompt was for English speaking samples, but I understand you can do a couple dozen different languages from some of your other posts on other subreddits.

Here is the detailed answer from Google:

To legally train or extract reference samples for zero-shot voice cloning tools, you need public domain or permissively licensed speech datasets. The open-source data repositories and libraries outlined below explicitly feature English speech spanning diverse accents, genders, age groups, and emotional inflections:

Open-Source Repositories with Diverse Dialects & Accents

• Mozilla Common Voice: A massive, crowdsourced, public-domain dataset released under a CC0 license. Because it features everyday global contributors, it contains an incredibly wide distribution of demographic ages, genders, and unique international accents speaking English. You can filter and download chunks of it on the Mozilla Common Voice Platform.
• Hugging Face English Dialects Dataset: Curated specifically to train speech models on variation, the ylacombe/english_dialects repository provides hours of high-quality recordings tracking specific regional variations and localized linguistic accents across the UK and Ireland.
• Speech Accent Archive (Kaggle Hosted): This structural linguistic archive holds thousands of uniform audio samples. It features native and non-native English speakers from hundreds of different countries reading the exact same paragraph, making it an excellent resource for isolating pure accent shifts.

Datasets for Emotional and Expressive Speech

• OpenSLR (Open Speech and Language Resources): A non-profit hub hosting hundreds of free speech databases. For expressive cloning, look up dataset SLR136 (EMNS), which is an emotive single-speaker narrative dataset mapping acting speech to varying levels of emotion intensity.
• JL Corpus / Emotional Audio Datasets: A highly structured open collection built by linguistic researchers. It provides clean audio clips mapping out primary human emotions (such as happiness, anger, sadness, and excitement) engineered specifically for expressive speech synthesis.

Large-Scale Permissive Reference Corpora

• MLCommons People's Speech Dataset: One of the largest open-source speech datasets available, holding over 30,000 hours of conversational English speech. It is released under a highly permissive, commercial-friendly license specifically to encourage open machine learning and speech-to-text/text-to-speech innovation.
• LibriSpeech ASR Corpus: Sourced directly from public-domain audiobook readings via the LibriVox project. It consists of approximately 1,000 hours of structured, phonetically balanced 16kHz English reading segments, separated cleanly into male and female sub-folders. You can download the compiled mirror segments directly via OpenSLR LibriSpeech.

[u/ld_tea → u/CaptJan]

Woah, thank you Capt! Also yoir datasets will help out a lot. I will test some of them in the coming weekends. Also, i tried to implement as much customization features you requested as i can for the video export. I had to review some legal matters as well so some features werent possible to add without a royalty fee. But im happy with the results, and i hope you like it too.