Obi DAISY NISO Audio Authoring Tool

Obi is a free audio book authoring software application that produces digital talking

books (DTBs) conforming to DAISY 3 (officially, the ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Specifications)

natively. It is easy to use and accessible DAISY production tool that enables anybody

to produce accessible yet rich DAISY content with minimal amount of training.

Audio editor working on Obi

The intended audience of Obi range from home users to large scale production houses

& distributed DAISY production systems. This includes, but is not restricted to,

print-disabled users. By empowering mainstream users, Obi brings the benefits of

DAISY technology to a broader range of consumers. In situations where time and cost

constraints limit the use of sophisticated synchronized multimedia production tools

(e.g. classroom environment, people and organizations in developing countries), Obi

can unlock the potential of producers and consumers.

Obi is provided free of cost for rapid dissemination of DAISY technology and at the

same time eliminate the cost constraints for universal adoption.

It is open source; is released under the

LGPL license

which means its source code is available for anyone to run, modify and redistribute.

Project vision

Empower individuals and organizations across the globe to create accessible and feature-rich

content overcoming diversities like language, accessibility needs & cost constraints.

Equip users with an open-source, localizable tool to enable DAISY production, with

minimum training, with complete independence as well as provide reference implementation

and basis for further customization, reinforcing DAISY consortium’s commitment of

development & promotion of world wide accessible publishing standard by empowering

even the far flung users.

Latest release

The latest release is

Obi 2.5

, released on December 14, 2012 with several significant

new features.

Benefits and features

Can produce digital talking books (DTBs) conforming to both DAISY 3 and DAISY 2.02

with a choice of having exported audio files in WAV or MP3 formats.

One of the rare audio-ncx production tools providing complete support for creating

skippable structures like footnotes, annotations, etc.

Full accessibility (keyboard navigation, magnification of text and graphics, audio

clues and support for screen readers, even for the less sophisticated open source

screen readers)

Personalization by the way of customizing keyboard shortcuts per user preferences.

Supports internationalization - can be easily localized into various languages.

Minimal learning curve; simple and comprehensive GUI with logical grouping of menu

items and self-explanatory dialog boxes make Obi easy to learn.

Carefully designed set of intertwined views enabling visual users to work simultaneously

in various views on a single application window. At the same time, facilitating non-visual

users to navigate through the views giving the notion of separate windows.

Meticulously devised recording process catering to the need of both beginners and

advanced users; main attractions being advanced recording mode to gear up the recording

process and slim recording toolbar enabling narrating and execution of recording

commands concurrently.

Highly efficient workflows like Automated book production from pre-recorded audio

files reduce manpower requirements.

Enables utilization of existing resources via the import feature, whereby users can

import project from full-text full-audio book & audio-NCX DAISY 3 books, structure

from DTBook XML & XHTML files, audio from WAV & MP3 files.

Tolerance to mistakes, automated project recovery feature reduces the probability

of losing important data to bare minimum.

Supports undo and redo operations to revert to desired state.

Provides facility to mark the error phrase on the fly as To do while recording as

well as at the time of editing.

Can be further customized for encompassing special requirements as it is open-source.

From version 2.0 onwards, Obi uses the upgraded

Urakawa SDK

2.0 and its satellite assemblies as backend. Upgraded

Urakawa SDK

2.0 is the outcome of the merger of code bases of Obi & Tobi incorporating the advantages

of both the tools to evolve Urakawa SDK as a powerful backend for multi-application

use.

Further empowerment by the embedded

Pipeline-lite

enhances Obi's capabilities for post-authoring operations and customization/refinements.

System requirements

Runs on Windows XP (SP2 and later), Vista, Windows 7

Uses Dot Net 2.0+ and DirectX 9c for audio

Uses Java Runtime Environment 6.0+ for Pipeline-lite

Download Obi

Project roadmap

Obi 2.0 was the first release of Obi developed on the backend evolved from the merger

of code bases of Obi and Tobi. From here on, both the tools will progress collectively,

empowering each other by implementation of new advancements in their common backend.

The combined

project charter (2011-2012, revised for Phase 2)

defining development plan for Obi and Tobi in Phase 2 of the project was approved

by DAISY Consortium board in November 2011, São Paulo board meeting.

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