One of the easiest ways to start creating MP3 files of eBooks is to visit download TextAloud from NextUp. The product costs $29.95 but they do have a trial offer for you to try out.
Then you will need a “voice”. Because I am British I use “Graham” from Acapela. Voices from this manufacturer cost $35. There are lots more voices that you can hear samples of at that website. Male, female, US, Australian, Indian, just take your personal choice. RealSpeak voices cost $45. AT&T Natural Voices generally cost $35. A pair of NeoSpeech voices cost $35. The larger the file-size of a “voice” the better it should be, because it will have the pronunciation of more words than a smaller sized voice, and it should also have rules for deciding between the pronunciation of the roughly 120 words in the English language that have two or more different pronunciations. If there is a choice between 8 kHz (kilohertz) and 16 kHz voices take the 16 kHz, because this number indicates the sampling rate per second. Your computer comes complete with some voices that will work with TextAloud, but they are not as good as, say, the Acapela voices. When you are listening to a good, modern, voice, it is hard to believe it is not a real person that is speaking. Any voice you buy should be described as SAPI5, as that is the most modern standard.
Now take an e-book, such as one you have downloaded from Project Gutenberg. The simplest ones to do are the ones that have the word “Chapter” or “CHAPTER” at the start of each chapter. Sometimes you find e-books that have just a numeral at the start of each chapter, and then you will need to edit their text. Preparing the e-book to be read by TextAloud is done by firing up TextAloud, and then going to “File/File Splitter Utility”, which will give you some simple choices concerning the name of the output files and where you want them written to, then it will produce separate files for each chapter. This makes handling the final MP3 files much easier. Then click on “Options/TextAloud Options/Predefined Pauses”. Enter “Sentence Pause Interval” as 0.6 seconds, and “Paragraph Pause Interval” as 1.0 seconds. This helps when listening to the book, as you get a little extra pause at the end of each sentence, and at the end of each paragraph.
By now you will have received a CD with the voice you have bought, and installed it onto your computer. You need to tell TextAloud about this, so go to “Options/Voices and File Options/Engines/Voices” and select the default voice. You could do this via your computer’s Control Panel. Then load the chapters of your book into TextAloud, from wherever you told the program to write them to. Perhaps you don’t want to make MP3 files of the PG texts at the start and end of the book, so you don’t need to load these. Preferably you will edit them out when you get the book, in the first place.
Now you are ready to start listening to the book, so click on the Speak icon, but first make sure that the volume of your computer’s speaker is set to an adequate level, and that it is not set to Mute. You might need to check out the advanced settings in “Control Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices”, but do note down the correct settings when you find what they are. This is because some games programs change these settings, and this could result in poor sound in an e-Book reading program. As you listen to the book you may find that a few words are incorrectly pronounced. Make a note of them, and then Stop the speech when you want to start correcting them. The better and the more recent the voice, the fewer words will be in this list. You will find that some of the various Place and Person names in the text (Proper Nouns) are not correctly pronounced. There is a Pronunciation Editor in TextAloud, which is fairly easy to use, once you have got the hang of it. To restart the reading from where you stopped it, the current cursor position, hit Control-F4.
You can now start creating MP3 files of the book. TextAloud can create files in three formats, WAV, MP3 and WMA. Click on “Options/TextAloud Options/File Options” and set Audio File Format to MP3. Then set Bit/Sample Rate to 24 kbps, 16 kHz. Note: kbps means Kilobits per second. You probably won’t get much improvement by going to higher settings. You could experiment a bit with this, if you like. You also need to set the Write Speed, and you are recommended to use 10 at first, but later on you could try 20, and see if it works alright for you at this speed. Most importantly, you need to set the Audio Output Directory.
Now click on “To File”. The program will ask you to confirm the settings you have made, and then it will settle down to making the MP3 files of the book. You will see that as it processes each chapter it first creates the WAV file, and then it converts it to MP3. An average book might take 12 hours to read aloud, so a Write Speed of 20 would get that book written in 36 minutes. You can do something else on the computer while this is happening, but only if the Write Speed isn’t set too high. Do your emails, for instance.
I always add tags to my MP3 files, which means that as they are being played, information about them is displayed in the little screen on your MP3 player or MP3-CD player. For this purpose the ID3V1 format is easiest to deal with. It consists of 128 bytes added on the end of the MP3 file. The 128 bytes are used thus: 3 bytes for the word “TAG”, 30 bytes each for Title, Artist, Album, Comment, 4 bytes for Year, 1 byte for Genre. For Title read “Chapter”, for Artist read “Author”, for Album read “Book-Title”. I can let people have a free utility that produces a report about the play-length of each chapter, and adds the tags. It is part of the Athelstane e-book system which I put in the public domain a couple of years ago.
You can now burn the folder containing the MP3 files you have just created to a CD, as a data CD. Even an 18-hour Charles Dickens book will fit onto a data CD. Consider a 12-hour book. This is 12 x 3600 seconds. 24 kbps is 3000 Bytes per second, so we are looking at 129.6 megabytes, and there are about 700 megabytes on a CD.
If you want to put the book into an MP3 player I generally use Windows Explorer rather than any software supplied by the manufacturer. A good MP3 player with a gigabyte of memory, that can store four or five books, can be bought for around $40 these days. The advantage of an MP3 player rather than a CD-MP3 player is that if you decide that you could have improved the pronunciation of certain names in the book, you could remake the MP3 files, and reload the player. The advantage of a CD-MP3 is that you can carry a library of them with you when you go on holiday, and also you could put several books on a CD, Sometimes I put the Acapela voice rendering on the CD, and also the rendering by a totally different program (Fonix ISpeak), so I can listen to either version. Also if the book is rather short and there are several books on the CD play will continue from one book to the next, so there’s something playing all the time for that long car journey, from just one CD.
The CD-MP3 player is somewhat affected by going over bumps in the road. Play may either jump or even stop. You can get things that are supposed to reduce the bumping effect, but I use an old straw hat on the seat, with the player on top of it. When I want to stop and go shopping I put the player under the straw hat, so a casual thief isn’t tempted!
Unfortunately the in-car CD player doesn’t play this type of CD, or indeed any type you can make yourself, so you need to trick it. You can get a small radio transmitter from Belkin, the F8V3080, for $23.40 from Amazon. It is about the size of an MP3 player. You have to find a radio frequency that isn’t in use in your area. Connect your CD-MP3 player to the Belkin transmitter, and tune it and your car radio to the same frequency. It works best if you hang the transmitter over the rear-view mirror, because that gives it a position near the aerial of your car. You can dispense with this if you live in a country that allows you to wear headphones while driving. Alternatively you can have one of those travel loud-speakers, but that’s a lot bigger than the Belkin transmitter.
While you can get tiny earphones boxed for you with most audio items, I would recommend “Neck earphones” because these do not easily become dislodged, even if you wear them in bed. One last hint: make sure that all equipment you are buying has 3.5 mm jack-plugs, as there is a smaller size of 2.5 mm that is not robust enough.