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Tobi overview

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Original Author(s): Daniel Weck and Prashant Ranjan Verma

Tobi is a multimedia production tool for creating human narrated talking books synchronized with text and images conforming to the DAISY 3 format otherwise known as the ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005 standard.

Tobi is open-source software and is available free of charge from the DAISY Consortium. Tobi is built with extensibility in mind, based on a plugin architecture that greatly facilitates the development of new features, and the incorporation of external contributions.

Tobi application window screenshot

Tobi Features

  • Tobi is designed to ease the process of synchronizing a text document with human narration, including page numbers, hierarchical table of contents, images, footnotes, etc.
  • Tobi provides a live recording workflow that is fully-integrated with structured text (i.e. document markup). Tobi can also import external audio clips (MP3 and WAV formats currently supported).
  • Tobi's zoomable and multilevel waveform editor support selection, delete, insert, cut/copy/paste, playback, punch-in punch-out recording, etc.
  • Tobi offers a basic text editing feature (handy to fix typos). Although basic structure editing is planned for a future release, it is recommended to author text documents as part of a proven XML workflow, and use Tobi for multimedia synchronization only.
  • Tobi also provides an editor for rich DIAGRAM image descriptions.

Supported Formats

Tobi can import-

  • DTBook XML documents: Tobi supports the semantically-rich DTBook XML document format, which is currently used by the DAISY standard, the NIMAS framework and the EPUB format. DTBook documents can be created from scratch using the Save As DAISY addons for Microsoft Word and Open Office, or by converting from other formats using the open-source DAISY Pipeline tool.
  • DAISY 3 full-text full-audio books: Tobi can import existing DAISY 3 full-text full-audio Digital Talking Books, making it easy to re-purpose or fix material that is already published.

Tobi currently exports to the DAISY 3 format (latest 2005-3 version) but the DAISY Pipeline can be used to "downgrade" to a DAISY 2.02 fileset in order to support legacy reading devices.

See also


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This page was last edited by PVerma on Tuesday, January 3, 2012 03:24
Text is available under the terms of the DAISY Consortium Intellectual Property Policy, Licensing, and Working Group Process.

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