Electron Stories and Audiobooks

Stories and Audiobook are available from the sidebar and command search. Each keeps a separate draft. Choose a saved default voice, enter or import text, then render. Stories supports per-line voice overrides; chapter headings and pause markup use the same storyToSpans compiler as Tauri. Audiobook submits the original script to the existing backend parser.

Both editors use the shared longform backend, real chapter progress, assembly status, and an explicit Stop action. Stop aborts the HTTP stream so the backend stops scheduling chapters. A truncated stream cannot replace the last successful output. Interrupted server manifests can be resumed explicitly without sending the edited manuscript again. Navigation leaves a render running; a renderer restart disconnects it and recovery uses the server manifest inventory.

Playback and export remain independent of generation. Vidstack plays the output; long-form audio uses a seek bar without decoding an entire book into a waveform. Play waits until the native media provider is ready. MP3 and M4B are supported by the existing backend. The native export dialog saves a local copy. A finished render also offers a chapter cue sheet — a .txt of HH:MM:SS<TAB>Title, one line per chapter — for show notes, podcast platforms and players that do not read the chapters M4B embeds and MP3 cannot carry. Its timestamps are summed from the exact per-chapter milliseconds the backend writes into the M4B chapters, over only the chapters that rendered, so they match the embedded chapter starts (shown in whole seconds, hours unbounded); a chapter that failed contributes no line and no elapsed time. The file is saved through the native save dialog.

Draft writes reuse the coalesced persistence helper and flush on lifecycle events. Working drafts currently use browser storage. Named Stories and Audiobook projects use the shared native IndexedDB adapter in a separate Electron database. Saves await the committed transaction, concurrent writes are serialized, and opening or deleting a project requires confirmation. Projects include script/lines, voices, settings and the last output reference. Storage failures are surfaced. Book details include author, narrator, year, genre, description and an uploaded JPEG/PNG cover. Loudness offers off, ACX and podcast presets. Audiobook pronunciation rows reach the existing lexicon engine; duplicate words are flagged before rendering. These settings persist with the draft. Full cast management and other advanced controls remain tracked in electron/PARITY.md.

electron/tests/longform-smoke.mjs verifies the main flows with mocked generation and real audio playback. Runtime tests cover stop, duplicate prevention, truncated responses, explicit resume and shared Stories compilation. Real installed-model verification passed for one English chapter: MP3 rendering, cached WAV chapter audition, and Electron-driven M4B rendering/playback. Multi-voice, multi-chapter, cancellation/recovery and other engines still require real runtime coverage.

Script voice tags now expose saved-profile assignments in the Cast section. Only names present in the current script are sent as voice_map; assignments persist for reuse if a tag is reintroduced. An assignment to a removed profile blocks rendering until changed or reset to Default. Chapter, word and estimated runtime counts reuse the Tauri script helpers.

Audiobook Preview plan uses the backend parser and exposes per-chapter auditions. Auditions send the same voice, cast, language and pronunciation inputs as full renders, warming the shared cache. Editing those inputs clears stale auditions. Preview requests are aborted on navigation, never replace a full render, and expose their own Vidstack playback.

Production overrides now expose synthesis steps, guidance, sampling temperatures, postprocessing, seed and repeat variation. Emotion controls appear when the active engine advertises support. Reset restores the shared Tauri defaults; untouched fields are omitted from requests. The extracted longformOverrides helper is used by both apps, and chapter auditions carry the same overrides as full renders. Seamless-join controls (gap between lines, gap between paragraphs, trim engine silence) live in the same panel; untouched or reset controls show the preserved server defaults (zero gaps, trimming off). Set gaps and enable trimming explicitly for seamless joins; see docs/expressive-speech.md.

Run electron/tests/longform-live.mjs with VOICESTUDIO_LIVE_PROFILE set to a local saved profile for an explicit real-render check. It verifies the active model is already installed before synthesis. The real run exposed missing JSON request headers in the shared client and array-shaped failed-chapter results; regression tests now cover both.

Stories now includes named characters with saved voice assignments, character selection per line, explicit per-line voice overrides, shared/global speed and per-line speed overrides. The book-wide speed sits in the setup card beside voice and language (not inside the Cast card); it counts the lines that carry their own speed and hands them back to the book-wide value in one click. Voice resolution and chapter compilation reuse the Tauri helpers. Lines move up/down with keyboard-accessible buttons; chapter insertion uses the same heading grammar. A story with every spoken span assigned can render without an unnecessary default-voice selection. Removed profiles block rendering rather than silently changing the voice.

Stories Auto-cast accepts tagged dialogue, screenplay text and attributed prose. The shared local parser appends lines, reuses existing characters/voices, and assigns available profiles to new speakers. Distinct names that normalize to the same identifier remain separate characters. No network or LLM call is involved.

A Stories script can also be built from a finished dub, which replaces the current script, cast and pending import with the dub's speakers and lines. The action lives in the Dub workspace; see docs/electron-dubbing.md.

WebVTT (.vtt) captions also import locally; their cue metadata is dropped before the spoken lines enter Stories.

Stories imports TXT, Markdown and SRT locally; EPUB/PDF still use the shared backend importer. The EPUB importer skips marked pagination and ancillary sections such as cover, title, dedication, contents and copyright pages. Unmarked pages are judged by the book's own structure: only a short, heading-less, unlisted page ahead of the reading start is skipped, even when an EPUB 2 guide or EPUB 3 landmark declares that start; headed or substantial unlisted prologues are retained; the same kind of stray page is skipped at the back only once back matter that the contents lists has begun, so an unlisted file that continues the last chapter is always kept. Publisher and bibliography headings such as “Published by” and “Novels by” are skipped only on short, unlisted pages before the reading start; an ambiguous heading alone (for example “Works”) is not enough to delete a section. Unmarked numeric paragraphs and page-break layout classes remain narration. Chapter titles prefer the EPUB 3 table of contents, then NCX labels and headings; namespace aliases and declared encodings are supported. Malformed optional navigation falls back to headings, while malformed package/container XML reports an import error. Imported text goes into a persisted review buffer, then Auto-cast or Split into lines appends to existing work. The splitter is shared with the browser app and offers three presets: Sentences (the sentence-aware splitter with the same 40-2000 character limit), Paragraphs (the default; one line per blank-line paragraph, or per line when the text has no blank lines at all; LF, CRLF and lone-CR endings are all understood) and Chapters (one line per chapter body, split only at chapter headings — a non-empty # Title, the same grammar the renderer uses). A chapter heading is always its own line so it renders as a chapter marker.

The Electron workspace keeps title, default voice, language and output format together in a fixed setup card. Advanced cast, project, production and book controls use separate collapsed cards. The editor keeps its full working width; an empty Story shows one Add First Line action, while an empty Audiobook shows the supported chapter and voice markup directly in the script field.

Stories line auditions reuse the shared WAV assembler and canonical voice/pause/speed parser. Auditions resolve inline names with the same fallback as full renders, expose Stop, and play through Vidstack independently. Changing synthesis inputs clears stale playback; navigation aborts pending auditions. Browser coverage verifies actual playback with mocked generation.

The optional Stories Stems section renders one WAV per character with the shared Tauri assembler. It reports completed character groups, supports cancellation, and offers explicit individual downloads after completion. No automatic multi-file download is triggered. Input changes discard stale download links. Browser regression checks all character groups and the downloaded WAV bytes. The shared native Save As bridge writes renderer-generated bytes in packaged Windows and Linux builds; macOS remains the native export gate.

EPUB chapters honor byte-order marks and XML/HTML encoding declarations, including legacy Latin and CJK encodings. Unsupported or invalid declarations use the shared text-import fallback so one bad declaration does not abort the book.

EPUB decompression limits include required metadata as well as navigation and chapter content. A navigation document without a navigation element falls back to chapter headings.

Long-script layout

The Stories editor grows with the manuscript inside the page scroll container. Generate/Stop, the chapter tracker and the render status live in a footer pinned to the setup pane, so the primary action and its progress stay visible however long the script is; with the setup pane collapsed the same panel sticks to the bottom of the editor instead. When Generate is unavailable the panel states the one reason (import running, engine not ready, no spoken lines or script, a line with no voice and no default voice, a duplicated pronunciation word) rather than only greying the button.

Clear a script

Stories and Audiobook offer Clear script with confirmation. Stories removes all lines, chapter markers and pending import text while retaining the cast; Audiobook clears its manuscript. The web Stories editor clears pending pasted text too, stops playback, ignores late preview results and releases preview audio when clearing, removing or replacing lines. Confirmation also names pending imported text. Clearing an imported script does not recreate the demo story.

The pinned chapter tracker scrolls within the available setup-pane height, keeping Stop reachable in compact windows. Collapsing setup moves the controls into the editor; they remain visible while scrolling long scripts. SRT and WebVTT manuscript imports preserve spoken numbers, including countdowns and numeric-only cues; cue indices, timestamps, the WEBVTT header, NOTE/STYLE/REGION blocks and cue identifiers are removed. Finished renders in Projects identify themselves: the row shows the book's title and a one-line recipe (voice · speed · engine · length), and How it was made expands to voice, speed, engine, language, format, size and the non-default settings. Renders made before this was recorded say so instead of showing a bare filename.

Render history includes effective sampling settings (including performance-tier defaults). Non-finite request values are rejected; older malformed numeric details are sanitized so Projects and completion events remain readable.

The output language picker in Clone, Stories and Audiobook disables languages outside the selected engine’s declared finite set. Auto remains available; unknown or model-specific language sets remain selectable and are checked by the backend. Reference recording languages and dubbing translation targets are independent of this output-language control. Switching engines preserves the selected language rather than rewriting saved projects.