Happy Douglas Adams September To All!

well, a little more than halfway through editing a Word document (created from an Amazon Kindle ebook) of Douglas Adams's The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul to conform to the audiobook he himself recorded for it.

first, i had to clean up the audiobook itself a bit:
• inserting "Chapter X" (where X is a number from 1 to 35) at the beginning of each chapter (borrowing the audio mostly from his audiobook of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and "Chapter 1" from his audiobook of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish);
• repairing a number of words which had gotten cut off halfway through (often at the end of tracks) or were otherwise incomplete — only having the 'hoke'  part of "hoax" but not the 'ks'  sound at the end, for instance;
• inserting small silences between chapters to help with the flow;
• and deleting the commercial branding of the previous (now defunct) copyright holder.

now i'm closely listening to the recording and altering the text in the Word document to more precisely match the recording.

and i'm making footnotes to document each change and/or to give the original text in the ebook that has been omitted or changed in the audiobook; this is the part that takes some time.

like i said, i see this as Douglas Adams's final edit of the book.  next, i plan to do Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and eventually move on to the five books of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series.

when i've finished Long Dark Tea-Time, i may work on some software which could quickly (i hope) move through the AIFF audio files and extract the audio for a given sample of text from the book — sort of an on-demand Douglas Adams voice.  it would be limited to text which appears in the book, but i'd be interested in the results; if it's successful, it could be expanded to include more books as i edit their corresponding documents to match their Douglas-Adams-read audiobooks — that's the main point of creating a text that very closely matches.

Happy September!

[the above post was copied directly from a dsm32 post:
http://dsm32.blogspot.com/2017/09/happy-douglas-adams-september-to-all.html ]

and i've been having fun getting used to Douglas Adams's voice; i hope to create some kind of sound-frequency / volume envelopes from his sentences which can then be applied to syntactically identical sentences uttered by a voice synth — will be interested in how it comes out, especially on the CereProc Scottish 'Heather' voice!