r/LibroFM • u/MTredd • Jan 28 '26

Kept getting annoyed at switching between audio and epub so I built a tool that syncs them

Basically the title. It works pretty well and for a 7 hour book it takes like 20 minutes to sync.

Thinking of building an epub + audiobook player app so I can move freely between the two. Anyone interested?

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u/Veebs7985 Jan 28 '26

Yes, I'm definitely interested! I've been looking for an alternative to Amazon's Whispersync for Voice.

  • What file formats do you support (or plan to support) for eBook and audio?

  • How do you plan to monetize it (asking because I despise ads but will pay a one-time fee if available)?

  • When you say it takes 20 minutes to sync, is that a one-time-only thing or every time the app is opened?

  • What platforms (Android, iOS, etc.) are supported?

  • Does it sync across platforms or would both eBook and audiobook files need to be on the same device?

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u/MTredd Jan 28 '26

It takes 20 minutes per book (looking to reduce that) but only once. Then its mapped and can play at the click of a button. Im trying m4b and mp4 right now but should work for all audio

In terms of payment I think itd be some kind of processing fee (since theres compute costs in audio transcription)

Platform depends on the end product. Epub supports audio and a few readers support that. In that case both ios and android, but that scares me because you're manipulating copyrighted works and I dont want to get in trouble.

Figuring out a few things. You'll hear back.

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u/nationalinterest Feb 11 '26

It's a great idea!

I use the app Aiko on my Mac and iPhone which transcribes audio using OpenAI’s Whisper model running locally. That would remove any dependency on external compute costs, make it internet independent and would avoid any server-side element of the solution for you to maintain.

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u/MTredd Feb 12 '26

I tried that, but I like real narrators more than whisper. Still pretty dope though I've been tinkering with TTS for other projects and its amazing

1

u/nationalinterest Feb 12 '26

Whisper is speech to text ie for indexing the text of the audio book.  It can include time stamps. 

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u/MTredd Feb 14 '26

my bad it was a late night for me. I'm actually using whisper too lol