Cool app!
I've had some issues with getting it to work, though:
- ebook-convert is not a small dependency, it seems that it only comes bundled with calibre software. And calibre has huge number of python dependencies (>400 packages on OpenSuse) - don't know about you, but I'm not polluting my install with that for a small tool. So, I've grabbed appimage version of calibre, extracted it and added symlink to the bundled ebook-convert. It is still around ~500mb of wasted space, but atleast it's local to a single folder.
Could you replace it with another tool/library, or include only necessary stuff with binary?
- Then I've encountered another problem. I have no piper installed on my system, but readme says:
> You don't need to have piper installed. This program manages piper and the associated models.
It didn't download piper release and proceeded without errors. Then it did download some models. After that it errored out on trying to change directory to non-existent "~/.config/QuickPiperAudiobook/piper"
So naturally, I looked in source code, found link to piper tarball and extracted it myself.
A-ha! Now it works. Until..
- Done. Saved audiobook as /home/archargelod/Audiobooks/text.wav
You could try to guess what was the problem, but I'm going tell you right away: it didn't create "Audiobooks" folder and again there were no errors.
Thankfully, that was the last issue and after I created ~/Audiobooks manually, my generated wav was there.
Thank you for the feedback and I'm sorry you had those issues. I cannot replicate at the moment on Ubuntu 24.04 but will check back on this. I presume it is something simple going wrong with how I am getting the home directory in golang and checking if the path exists.
Your feedback on ebook-convert is very valid. I can take a look at breaking it up. (Granted I am not sure how much of a lift that would be)
The intention seems to have been to skip running ebook-convert if the input file is already a text file, but it runs it anyway. So I recompiled it to not do that.
...at which I did some more digging and realized that (for my purposes anyway -- operating on txt files), QPA can simply be replaced with piper itself!
Re: the ebook-convert dependency, I wonder if there are any feasible alternatives? My first thought was pandoc, which is ~140MB, but I guess that's smaller than Calibre's ~1400MB (!!!).
- ebook-convert is not a small dependency, it seems that it only comes bundled with calibre software. And calibre has huge number of python dependencies (>400 packages on OpenSuse) - don't know about you, but I'm not polluting my install with that for a small tool. So, I've grabbed appimage version of calibre, extracted it and added symlink to the bundled ebook-convert. It is still around ~500mb of wasted space, but atleast it's local to a single folder.
Could you replace it with another tool/library, or include only necessary stuff with binary?
- Then I've encountered another problem. I have no piper installed on my system, but readme says:
> You don't need to have piper installed. This program manages piper and the associated models.
It didn't download piper release and proceeded without errors. Then it did download some models. After that it errored out on trying to change directory to non-existent "~/.config/QuickPiperAudiobook/piper" So naturally, I looked in source code, found link to piper tarball and extracted it myself.
A-ha! Now it works. Until..
- Done. Saved audiobook as /home/archargelod/Audiobooks/text.wav
You could try to guess what was the problem, but I'm going tell you right away: it didn't create "Audiobooks" folder and again there were no errors.
Thankfully, that was the last issue and after I created ~/Audiobooks manually, my generated wav was there.