Obi 4.3

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.

v4.3 [Nov 4, 2019]
Detail on New Features and Enhancements of Obi 4.3:
- Introduction of a dialog for quick configuration of Obi when it is started the first time—This release introduces a convenient way of configuring the basic settings in Obi such as input device name, output device name, and profiles, via the Configurations dialog. which appears when you first start Obi after installation. You can modify these settings any time later by using the Preferences dialog.
- Facility to restrict unintended modification of structure while narration—You can disable the modification of the structure of your project by checking the check box Switch to read only structure via the Project tab of the Preferences dialog. This feature is very useful for preventing unintended modification of structure while recording.
- Updated language pack for French—Many thanks to European Digital Reading Lab for consistently updating the French translation.
- Choice of removing accents from the filenames during DAISY 2.02 export—Obi can now normalize accents during the production of books in languages that contain accents. If you choose to append section names to audio file names for non-English books, the file names may contain some characters that may create issues in accessing them. This feature normalizes the accents in file names to curb such issues. The Audio tab of the Preferences dialog provides the check box Remove accents from filenames during DAISY 2.02 export to activate or deactivate this functionality.
- Project and audio preferences made more manageable by segregation—Obi now classifies a few project and audio settings as additional settings, if they are not used frequently by users. You can access these settings by using the Additional Project settings and Additional Audio Settings button in the Project and Audio tabs of the Preferences dialog respectively.
- New keyboard shortcut for pasting multiple phrases—You can now conveniently paste multiple phrases by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl Alt Z.
Some of the Major Bugs that have been Fixed and Behaviour Changes made in the 4.3 release:
- In the TOC view, the copy command copied full name of the section even when a part of the section name was selected.
- When a new section was created and multiple phrases were copied and pasted (using multiple phrase operations), the undo command could not remove all the copied phrases in one go.
- Removing the headphones/earphones while navigating Content View in Play on navigate mode resulted in the null reference crash.
- Replaced the Preserve Zoom checkbox in Zoomed Waveform view with a button to prevent the checkbox from altering the space bar behaviour, which is supposed to start and pause the playback.
- One was not able to paste a set of phrases multiple times by giving consecutive paste multiple phrases commands.
- Added a message to inform that skippable structures are not exported to DAISY 2.02 file set.
- TODO mark position in a phrase is now preserved in an Obi session. The caveat is that currently it is not saved when Obi is restarted or project is opened again.
- User registration dialog now needs explicit authorization of the user for sharing the personal data with Obi team.
Known Limitations of Obi 4.3:
There are some limitations in this release which the team is working consciously towards resolving:
- Pipeline-lite does not work with non western characters in file path—Pipeline-lite is not able to operate if there are non western characters in path of the file. It is recommended to keep non western characters away from the file paths on which Pipeline-lite needs to work. This means that the DAISY 3 export folder and the DAISY 2.02 export folder should be placed at a location where there are no non western characters in its path. This only affects validation, mp3 encoding and fileset renaming process and does not hinder normal operations of book authoring.
- EPUB 3 export & import does not support skippable structures yet—The skippable structures like footnotes, sidebars, notes etc. are yet not supported by EPUB 3 export & import. The support will be added as the EPUB 3 navigable audio-only guidelines will progress.
- Error messages are not so user friendly—Error messages in message boxes when some invalid operation is done, give information. But these messages are not so user friendly, especially the exception messages. These will be replaced with more user friendly text in future.