I would like to have Aeneas built into Bloom

I would like to have Aeneas built into Bloom.
The problem I have is that (when the audio files are recorded separately and then imported into Bloom) the yellow box highlighting the text being read is NOT synchronizing with the words that are getting read. If Aeneas is built into Bloom, this problem will be corrected.
I realize that I can try to re-record the audio files OR I can press play then release and then press it again. But that makes more work for the user. If Aeneas is built into Bloom this will save the user enormous amounts of time. ALSO it is not always possible to re-record the audio if the native speaker is not present.

That would be awesome! A programmer here in PNG has made a hack that does this, but having it be official would be great.

Can you share that hack with us so that everyone can use it?

I imagine that if Bloom was able to make use of Aeneas then the process of making a book with audio would be different as we’d want to record the audio file all in one go. Then Aeneas would have the whole audio and text to create the timing files.
Also the Bloom reader might need to have an option of whether to turn the page automatically as the audio for that page is completed, or whether the audio should be paused until the user turns the page.

I’m checking on this.

I’ve asked SIL PNG not to share their tool until/unless they find time to trim out some of its functions that they needed for a project, which rely on some “insider information”/techniques that would cause difficulties for us if they were out in the wild.

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Thanks for your reply John.

Am I correct in thinking that a necessary part of this feature it would be to allow the use of pre-recorded audio. So that Bloom could use a single audio file for the whole book?

Bloom 4.5 will work with Aeneas to break up a page into text boxes. However this issue is unfortunately phrased as wanting Aeneas, which is just a technology/tool. Perhaps what you want is some actual capability like importing external audio. Since we already have one for that, Ability to add pre-recorded audio files, we’ll consider this one “DONE” when we ship 4.5.