WorkAudioBook – a tool for listening practice (and subtitle creation)

[DonCachopo]

I'm using a Bluetooth headset, but the buttons don't work for controlling the audio player. Anyone more?

[pon00050]

There is an alternative that I think is easy and still allows for sentence drilling.

I am on Macbook.

Tools required are "Audacity" and any program like VLC Media Player that plays audio files.

(These are the tools that I used but any other tools that do the job will be enough.)

 

Open Audacity.

Import the audio file into the Audacity.

Highlight/Select the entire audio by pressing Command + A (whatever the equivalent is on the Windows).

Go to Analyze and Sound Finder.

Then, click Okay.

You will see that the audio file you processed is now segmented. These segments are not perfect but it will probably be still useful.

You will now export these segmented files by going to File, Export, Export Multiple. Choose the desired folder location at this point.

Then, close Audacity.

Open all files in the folder that you exported these files into then open them all at once.

They should probably be in the correct chronological order.

 

During my studying routine, I open the exported files all at once and start the playlist, transcribing each sentence one by one.

This allows me to drill the sentences much similar to the way WorkAudioBook Program did for me.

Also, I imagine the steps that I listed above can also be executed on the Windows.

 

If you don't need to create subtitles with correct timing, which seems to be the another major function of WorkAudioBook,

then this simple process will still allow you to drill sentences easily.

[philwhite]

 

7 hours ago, pon00050 said:

Audacity ... Go to Analyze and Sound Finder.

 

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of that function. It seems you can configure it for dB level and time interval to interpret as a break/silence. If you are just looking to listen to the audio but want separate files, then this Audacity function looks like a nice, user friendly way of creating the files without a transcript. I'm sure you could do them same with a command line call to ffmpeg (which Audacity uses).

 

I haven't used Audacity nor WorkAudioBook and subs2srs for a long time because the workflow was so labour intensive for creating cards with text. Now, I use ffmpeg to combine all the audio files in a folder as batch, send to a cloud speech-to-text transcription service which returns a json file and then run a bash script to create the audio file segments and a .tsv file with all the text segments. Then I just import these into Anki. The text transcription is not perfect but much less work, now, to just correct the errors.

[pon00050]

Thank you for responding to my contribution in this thread.

I wasn't actually expecting to hear from anyone since this thread is from some time ago.

 

I completely empathize with what you are saying. Although those programs that you mentioned seem fantastic for what they can seemingly do,

its labor intensiveness certainly intimidates the users.

 

Once I transcribe all sentences of the audio files that I generated using Audacity, I actually import the text into the Chinese Text Analyzer.

Then, I go through the text again to identify the unfamilar vocabs. At that point, I run the Lua script that Imron has made for me in the past, allowing me to generate a file that can be imported into Anki to study those specific vocabs with their meanings and example sentences from the text that I just spent some time interacting with.