Obi is a free application that allows you to record digital talking books and then export them to an MP3 file. It utilizes the Digital Accessible Information System format. The program indeed is very easy to use. You just have to create sections and after that record audio for each of them. Furthermore, Obi can create title sections automatically. The program interface is very convenient to use. All sections are shown in a text list and their respective audio content can be visually seen in the right part of the program window. Obi supports Wave Sound format for all audio records. You can create as many sections as you need and arrange your titles, as if you were creating the index of a book, but still there is an audio file instead of text in every chapter. You can record speeches, books or anything that comes to your mind. It has a transportation bar that helps you go to the preceding or following page or phrase, and play backward or forward at faster speed. Also the elapsed time and the dB sound level per channel are shown.
v2.5 [Jan 31, 2013]
- Obi can now author skippable notes like footnote, prodnote, endnote, note, annotation & sidebar.
- Automated book production process has been introduced, by enhancing audio file import to generate the structure of the book and import its contents.
- Obi can now perform On-the-fly phrase detection to detect phrases while recording. It can be enabled from audio preferences.
- Fine navigation mode has been introduced to provide convenient way for fine adjustment of audio cursor and audio selection. It also enables quick alteration of nudge duration with up and down arrow keys.
- Live waveform generation has been incorporated in Obi that draws the waveform being recorded on the run and provides facility to mark phrases, pages and also chunk of audio to delete. It can be enabled from audio preferences.
- Replace audio functionality added to replace audio of selected section or phrase with external audio. This feature facilitates audio processing with external tools
- Multiple section phrase detection has new set of options.
- Export operation enhanced with options of adding section names to audio filenames for facilitating mp3/CD player users in easy identification of audio files.
- Both DAISY 3 and DAISY 2.02 export commands can now be executed in one go.
- ncc:depth & ncc:files metadata entries are added in DAISY 2.02 export
- Ability to generate audio for page phrases using text to speech engine has been introduced. Users can also select preferred synthetic voice to be used for audio generation and text to speech based audio clues.
- New Collect special phrases feature is introduced that collects all phrases of one kind in the project and enables quick search and navigation to the required one.
- Preferences dialog has been augmented with the Color preferences tab for personalizing colors used for elements and components of Obi's user interface.
- Recording toolbar can now be magnified for touch screen use.
- French language pack added. Thanks to localization work done by Association Valentin Haüy.
- Go to time in project option added in go to dialog box.
- New options added to transport bar time display.
- If pages are marked while recording, option is provided to renumber the subsequent pages when recording stops.
- Phrase detection parameters are saved in applications settings and can be adjusted from audio preferences. Furthermore the parameters can be extracted from a silence phrase using Phrases->apply phrase detection -> parameters from selected silence phrase menu item.
- Before executing operations like importing audio file, recording audio, and saving the project, Obi checks if there is enough disk space for proper execution of the operation and informs the users if it is less than the minimum limit.
- Cleanup operation made safer by adding an option to retain unused files, which may be reused in case of cleanup errors.
- Graphical peak meter window has been synchronized to the main application window; it goes down with the application when Obi is minimized and vice versa.
List of some major bugs fixed in this release:
- The recording process started filling audio in the next empty page when Next phrase command was given. The correct behavior is to create a new phrase before the empty page phrase and record in the newly created phrase.
- When the user executed the following series of commands - Begin note, End note, and Cancel the dialog thus opened; the End note command was not disabled and therefore its execution resulted in Null reference exception.
- Clear role from skippable note resulted in Null reference exception sometimes.
- Error was thrown while saving referred skippable phrase in the project created in Obi 2.5 alpha, due to different conventions used for saving anchors and their references.
- Occasional error thrown in export when illegal characters were stored as value of File name length limit.
- Opening the peak meter window used to shrink the main application window of Obi.
- Live waveform creation has been made more stable.
List of some major bugs fixed in Obi 2.5:
- Project upgrader missed out upgrading the audio format, when the project created in Obi 1.2 was opened in Obi 2.0 / 2.5 alpha.
- Validation errors were thrown by DAISY 2.02 validator, when append section name to audio file name option was used for DAISY 2.02 export.
- Add/Remove reference dialog for skippable structures has been stabilized and improved.
- Record in next page command used to ignore next empty page in the section for filling audio. Instead, it used to create new page for recording.
- Navigation buttons of transport bar were enabled, even if there were no pages or sections in the current playlist.
- Collect special phrases dialog had no option to collect empty phrases.
- Pre export checks missed out detection of duplicate page numbers for empty pages
- Export to DAISY 2.02 inserted Duplicate ncc:totalTime metadata entry in the imported book that already had TotalTime metadata entry.
- Obi failed to open the project if some of the audio files were missing.
- Missing windows/.NET framework components on some machines resulted in improper functioning of Obi.
- Installation on some versions of windows 7 failed due to inadequate permissions.
- Split command, if invoked during preview operation, used to split the phrase or section at the cursor position instead of the position from which preview was started.
- Obi used to throw an exception when Go to time command was used on empty section.
- After pausing the Play all command, initiation of the Play selection command from Transport menu used to fail.
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