20,858 Public Domain Audio Books

(librivox.org)

119 points smooke | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 15:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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freedomben ◴[21 Oct 25 23:45 UTC] No.45663216[source]▶

I really love librivox for what they've done and their mission, so please don't interpret this as a criticism. It simply is what it is, and I appreciate all the effort people have graciously donated to make life better and information more accessible for their fellow humans.

That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable. For those, an AI voice narrator would be much better, even with the current state of TTS. Is anybody working on an effort to produce these works with an AI voice?

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xattt ◴[22 Oct 25 11:44 UTC] No.45667630[source]▶

>>45663216 #

> … the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable.

Is there a name for this “value stuffing”? This seems to appeal to some form of subconscious hoarding. There is no possible way that you’ll listen to 20,000 audiobooks.

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1. kelipso ◴[22 Oct 25 12:40 UTC] No.45668173[source]▶

>>45667630 #

What’s the implication here? You can sample and make inferences about the rest. There’s a whole field called statistics that tells you how to do it.

He is right and pretty sure he was being generous in his description. I’ve tried listening to a few audiobooks there and almost all of them were bad. I only say almost because I didn’t listen to all of the audiobooks on there. I couldn’t get past a few minutes for any audiobook, and I listen to a decent number of audiobooks.

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