Obi: Import audio and mark structure during editing

Original Author(s): Prashant Ranjan Verma

Step 1: Setup the Project

You will need to create a new project in Obi by providing the book title and storage location. Refer to the topic Creating a New Project in Obi manual for more information on this step.

Step 2: Import audio files

You should import the audio files containing recording of the book contents into your project. See the topic Importing Audio Files for this process. The result will be that your project will have the complete audio of the book without the structure.

Step 3: Edit the audio and mark the structure

The idea is to listen to the available audio in the book, and mark all those pieces of audio which contain a new section or page announcement. Start by Auto-Splitting the Phrase so that the audio files imported by you get split into several phrases. Now listen to each phrase and if needed use the split and merge phrase tools to create phrases which contain only a section name or page number announcement. Mark these phrases as headings and pages respectively using the menu or keyboard shortcuts.

Step 4: Cleanup, review MetaData and book structure

If your recording includes page announcements, you should mark all those phrases containing recording such as page 1, page 2 etc. as pages. See the topic Pages and Special Roles for working with pages in Obi.

After editing the book audio, use the information in the topic Cleaning Unreferenced Audio to delete unwanted audio files from your project. It is important to note that till this operation is performed, it is possible to restore any audio that you had previously deleted during editing. If this command is not used, the project folder will contain those unused audio files, and unnecessarily occupy additional space on the storage media.

See the topic Metadata View to provide mandatory and recommended information about the book such as author, publisher etc. in the project.

Review the book structure in the TOC view to confirm that it aligns with the print source. You should make the necessary changes in the section name, level or sequence at this stage.

Step 5: Export to Daisy and Validate DTB

See the topic Exporting and Validating DTB to convert your project from the Obi specific format to Daisy DTB. You should then validate the project using the command available in the TOOLS menu. Book Validation is highly recommended and you should not distribute a book that is not valid as per Daisy standards. Such books may not play on all hardware and software playback tools.

Step 6: Encode audio to MP3 for distribution

In most cases, the project size will be too large, and you may want to create a compressed version for distribution. You can convert the audio in your project to MP3 format at a suitable bit rate. See the topic Encoding Audio to mp3 for audio compression.

Please note that there will be no need to perform this operation, if you had opted to have the audio files of exported DTB in MP3 format in previous step.

DAISYpedia Navigation

Other DAISY Resources