Adjust Timings

You can record all the sentences in a text box on a page, or in an overlay, at the same time or import an audio file. Then, you can adjust the timing for each sentence, so that highlighting matches the current sentence during playback.

To enable the Adjust Timing control, do these steps:

1. Show the Talking Book Tool.

2. Click Advanced, to display the options. Then below Recording Mode, select () By Whole Text Box (example).

3. Record all the sentences in the text box in one reading, or import a recording.

When you listen to the audio to check it, the normal highlighting is used.

4. Click  5) Adjust Timings.

The Adjust Timings dialog box opens (example).

5. Do any of these steps until you are satisfied with the results:

• Click  (play) to hear the recording of a sentence.

• If necessary, move the segment line to make the end of a sentence and beginning of the next sentence have a good transition.

• Click More  to display the options you can try, and then click any of the options.

• Click  Re-run pause-based timing guesses to remove any changes you made manually.

• Click Use Aeneas to guess timings. 

• Click  Edit Timings File, edit the timing of each sentence in the text file that opens.

The first column can be ignored or kept accurate if you want to do that. Bloom uses the numbers in the second column. You probably should not change the last time in the second column.

You can save more than one timing file with different names. Then, choose and apply the one that you want to use.

• Click   Apply Timings File to choose and use the timing file you think is best.

6. When you are satisfied with the timings, click OK to close the Adjust Timings dialog box.

7. Optionally, to break up the recording of a long sentence, do these steps:

• Click the place in a long sentence where you want to break to occur. Click  Insert Segment Marker or type a vertical bar (|) with your keyboard.

• If there is another long sentence, repeat the last step.

• When all the segment markers appear in the text box, click 5) Adjust Timings again.

Words that are highlighted stop or begin at that vertical bar. 

Bloom will hide the vertical bars when the Talking Book Tool is not open or the toolbox is not expanded. When the recording and timing adjustments are finished, you can remove the vertical bars if you want to. If you leave them, they will not appear in any published product.

Note

• https://docs.bloomlibrary.org/edit-timings/ describes how to use Audacity to make the timing more accurate.

You can have or save various iterations of your timing file. In this case, you can click  Apply Timings File to choose the file you want to use.

You might want to get more help.

• You can click  Clear and manually delete any segment markers you inserted. Then, select () By Sentence and record the content for each sentence.

• If Bloom does not synchronize the highlighted text with the audio in a satisfactory way, see Text-to-Speech overview.

• In the audio folder for the book, files include both *.mp3 and *.wav audio files.

Related Topics

Talking Book Tool overview

Talking Book Tool legend