Frequently Asked Questions - General Questions about Obi

Advanced recording mode lets the users to gear up the process of recording. You can enable or disable the advanced recording mode using Audio preferences. The options provided by this mode are described in the topic Live Recording.

If the errors occurred due to discrepancies between the duration of audio content of phrases and their respective entries in the SMIL file, you can import your DAISY book. Simply, increase the Import tolerance using Project preferences.

When a phrase exceeds the current width of Content view, other phrases of the section are adjusted to match its length. To alter this behavior, you can delimit the width of Content view by checking the checkbox Fix Content view width in Project preferences.

The option Retain initial silence must be turned off. You can turn this option on or off from the audio preferences tab of the Preferences dialog.

Obi comes with a pop-up toolbar that constitutes the controls for recording and structure mark-up. You can display it by clicking View->Show recording toolbar on the menu. Recording toolbar is separate from Obi’s application window, enabling the users to use it even when Obi is minimized. For more details, see the topic Recording toolbar.

Obi allows you to export audio of any phrase or section to an external file. See the topic Exporting audio to an External file for details.

Yes, you can open as many instances as you wish. See the topic Starting Obi for starting an instance

No, you can only open a single project. But you can open multiple instances of Obi and open a different project in each of them.

You can sort all the audio files (with .wav/.mp3 extension) in alphabetic order and play them one by one in any player that supports wav/mp3 format.

Various schemes are available for identifying digital publications. In the DTB domain, the requirements for an identifier are simply to identify the publication in a manner that is highly likely to be globally unique. A major purpose of the uniqueness requirement is to prevent filename collisions among bookmark files. To meet this base requirement, a simple DTB id scheme might be used. A DTB identifier under this scheme consists of a hyphen-separated string consisting of a two-letter country code drawn from [ISO 3166], an agency code unique within its country, and an identifier unique within the agency. For example, us-afb-x12345.

No, the project is a xuk file, whereas the DAISY DTB is a collection of audio, navigation and synchronization files. A DTB is created when you export the project as DAISY.

You cannot select multiple items arbitrarily. But, when you select a section, all the phrases get selected, and if you select a section in TOC View, the subsections and their phrases get selected, too.

It is not possible to use the copy command across several instances of Obi. But, you can import audio files from the data folder of one project to another.

You can import audio files of wav/rif format (having a .wav extension). Please note that the audio files should have the same audio settings (like channel and sampling rate) as your project.

No, you cannot import a DAISY DTB in this version, but a future version may support this feature.

Yes, you may configure Obi to save the changes automatically after some fixed amount of time. You may also choose to auto-save after each recording. These settings may be modified using the Project preferences tab of the preferences dialog.

No, the Content View cannot be hidden.

A limited number of phrases are shown at a single unit of time in Obi and hence, the phrases of some sections may be hidden. Such phrases can be made visible by clicking View->Show section’s contents on the menu, or by pressing F5. Whenever you make the phrases of a section visible, phrases of some other section will automatically be hidden from the view.

Blank phrases act as placeholders for audio content. You may use them for leaving a space for some audio content while recording. These can also be useful while creating a skeleton of the book.

If you do not assign a heading role to any phrase of the section explicitly, the first phrase would be considered the heading phrase.

Obi will play all the phrases of the sections one by one from the first to the last. So, the audio from the heading phrase will be played after the audio from the preceding phrases have been played.

Silence phrase is marked as Unused as it is used only for editing and should not appear in the DTB.

Duplication of page numbers is checked automatically before exporting, when you give the Export as DAISY command. But, you can also check manually if you wish to do so.

You can only check the sequence manually.

No, Obi will point out the duplicate page numbers while exporting the project as a DAISY DTB, but you have to correct them manually.

No, arbitrary multiple selection is not allowed in Obi, and the same is true for the audio contained in phrases.

Obi can produce digital talking books conforming to DAISY 3 and DAISY 2.02 standards.

Your microphone volume can be changed via the system settings. Follow the steps given below to change it:

1. Click Programs->Accessories->Entertainment->Volume Control on the Start Menu. Alternatively, you can double-click on the volume icon on the taskbar.

2. Click Advanced Controls on the Options menu.

3. Move the mic in volume slider up and down for increasing and decreasing the volumes respectively.

It is a phrase that holds a bit of audio for silence in your recording environment as it may differ from place to place. A preceding silence phrase is used for silence detection while auto-splitting a phrase.

When you choose to apply phrase detection, a dialog box opens showing the parameters determined from the preceding silence phrase. If there is no silence phrase preceding the current one, the dialog box shows the default parameters. You can change them if you want to use different ones.

The project can only be saved as a copy of the current project.

Delete unused data deletes all the data items (sections or phrases) that are marked as Unused from the project, and this command can be undone. Whereas, Clean Unreferenced Audio removes the audio data that is not referenced in the project from the disk and this command cannot be undone.

Zoom magnifies or shrinks everything that is visible in the work area of the Obi screen, whereas audio zoom scales the waveforms corresponding to all the visible phrases of the section horizontally.

The option Play on navigate may be turned off. To turn this option on click Transport->Play on navigate on the menu.

If you are playing a piece of audio at a faster rate and want to hear something just heard again at a normal speed, press E. Obi will go back a certain unit of time and start playing at the normal speed.

New project from import allows you to import the structure of the book from an xhtml file, whereas New project would create a blank project only and you have to create the structure manually.

The submenu of File->Recent Projects has a Clear List option at the end of the list of recently opened projects. Click on it to clear the list.

First, play the audio of the phrase, and then pause at the position where you want to insert the audio. Then, use the paste command to paste the audio from the clipboard.

Yes, you can do it by pressing F9. The current phrase would be marked as Todo, and Obi would create a new one next to it in the same section for recording. For more information on marking the structure while recording, see Create the Structure while Recording.

You can zoom the waveforms corresponding to all the visible phrases of a section by selecting Audio Zoom in or Audio zoom out from the View menu.

You can encode an exported DTB to MP3 by selecting Convert audio to MP3 from the Tools Menu. This version of Obi does not allow you to encode in any other format.

Yes, the Transport Bar has a Time Display control that shows the elapsed/remaining time during playback. You can also hear the time by pressing F8.

When you select a phrase clipboard of Obi will contain the phrase itself; whereas, if you select entire content of the phrase by pressing a single key A, the clipboard will contain the entire audio content present in the phrase, but not the phrase itself. This will result in different behaviors of the Paste command.