Tobi: a software tool to author DAISY multimedia

What's new ?

23 December 2011: version 1.6.0.0 is available. Follow the instructions on the Tobi download page to install or update the application.

Please visit the Tobi blog and subscribe to the RSS feed to get notified about project updates.

The Tobi/Obi joint project charter-Phase 2 (for 2011-2012) was approved by the board of the DAISY Consortium in November 2011 (at the São Paulo board meeting).

What is Tobi ?

• Tobi is a multimedia production tool that currently supports DAISY Digital Talking Books (open format otherwise known as the ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005 standard).
• Tobi also provides an editor for rich DIAGRAM image descriptions.
• 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.

What formats are supported ?

• 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.
• 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 export 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.
• Tobi will support the upcoming revision of the DAISY standard, and will be one of the early reference implementations of the new format (2011).

Is Tobi free open-source software ?

• Yes!
• Tobi is available free of charge, and is distributed under open-source licensing that allows commercial development (dual LGPL / BSD).
• 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.

(see more Tobi screenshots on this page, and in the Tobi user manual)