Tobi: an authoring tool for DAISY and EPUB3 talking books

Live Voice Recording

• PCM 16 bits, mono/stereo, up to 44.1kHz sampling rate.
• Volume level monitoring, peak meter with overload indicator.
• Punch-in recording with overwrite mode.
• Playback preview and silent recording start.
• Configurable input / output devices, support for any system-recognised sound card (DirectX 9).
• Dedicated "narrator" view: distraction-free reading / recording, support for dual-display setup.
• View full text document while reading, or display fragment only.

Audio Waveform Editing

• Instant rendering, fast zoom-in / out.
• Mouse + keyboard-driven selection tools and navigation commands.
• Cut / copy / paste, delete, insert, replace.
• Use existing audio files (automatic up/down-sampling, bulk import).
• Playback with increased rate, pitch preservation.
• Modify audio fragments using external WAV editing applications.
• Configurable colour scheme and visual style.

Text Synchronisation

• Sequential recording: move automatically to the next phrase.
• Easily break-down long recordings: "split and shift" function, to incrementally map audio and text.
• Configurable granularity level, e.g.: record sentence by sentence, or whole paragraphs at a time.
• Check missing audio, at a glance (list of "missing "empty" recording slots in the text content).
• Option to use TTS (synthetic speech), support for SAPI 5 voices.

Supported Formats

• DAISY 3 / DTBook XML, Digital Talking Books using the ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005 standard (also see the NIMAS framework).
• MathML-in-DAISY (embedded mathematical equations / formulas), and MathML within EPUB3 HTML5 documents.
• EPUB 3 Media Overlays (industry e-book standard based on HTML5, successor to DAISY 3)
• Experimental support for the DAISY Pipeline2 is included, to migrate from DTBOOK, DAISY3, DAISY2.02 to EPUB3.
• Audio: MP3 and uncompressed WAV (decoding and encoding), MP4-AAC (decoding).
• Support for Scalable Vector Graphics images, and inline SVG markup.
• DIAGRAM XML (see below).

User Interface

• High-quality scalable vector graphics, magnification for touch-screen or low-vision users.
• Fully keyboard-accessible, designed for screen-readers (JAWS, NVDA, etc.).
• Customisable keyboard shortcuts.
• Support for Windows high-contrast colour schemes.
• Search tools, to quickly find listed items using keywords.

Notable Features

• Reliable undo / redo.
• Navigation by headings and page numbers.
• Authoring-time bookmarks (mark locations in the text document).
• Fix minor typos (text-only editing, no structure / markup changes).
• Cleanup: remove unused files and WAV data from the project folder.
• Dedicated metadata editor, with built-in error checking (DAISY only, EPUB support is incomplete).
• Integrated content validation: EpubCheck and ZedVal (DAISY) to verify file sets at import and export time.

Image Descriptions

• Dedicated editor for the DIAGRAM content model, with unique support for audio narration.
• Import existing DIAGRAM XML, or create from scratch.
• Basic and advanced modes (the latter provides a rich metadata editor).
• Option to include descriptions in the exported publication, integrated into the content document (DAISY only, not EPUB).
• See all images in the document in a single navigation list.

Out of Scope

• Tobi is neither a word processing tool, nor an XML editor. To prepare well-structured text, consider using the Save-As-DAISY addons for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer.
• Tobi is not suitable to author structure-only audio books (e.g. NCX-only DAISY). You may want to use Obi.
• Tobi is not designed for automated production. See the DAISY Pipeline.

Wish List

• Support for VST audio plugins (current workaround: use external audio editor).
• Basic structure editing (e.g. delete unwanted sections, merge multiple book parts, split paragraph into individual sentences).
• Browser-based text renderer, to display the document based on its CSS styles (EPUB 3 / HTML5).
• Fully-fledged EPUB 3 metadata editor and validator.
• More?

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