The Audio Books task enables you to listen to your audio books stored on a hard drive. If you want to listen to your books on a CD, use the CD task instead this is explained in
here
The audio books formats supported are DAISY and compressed (MP3 WMA etc). Before you can listen to your books you need to include the folders containing them in the Library's Audio Books media directory as explained in the previous page. There are no sample books supplied with SpeakOn.
The directory structure in the library under the Books directory will reflect exactly the structure of the folders you included as explained in the previous page.
Let's say that all your books are organized according to their types as follows:
Books > DAISY books > DAISY books folders
Books > MP3 Books > MP3 books folders
You can listen to your books by doing the following:
The Audio Books task should be running. To find a book to play, you need to move the focus to the Library control if you are not already there. To do that, press the 'Focus' [Tab] (3) key.
Press the 'Left' [left arrow] (4) key a few times until you hear a beep and a message indicating that you are at the top level (level 0) of the tree. The focus is on the Audio Books media directory. Press the 'Right' [right arrow] (6) key and you are placed at the first sub-directory 'DAISY Books'. Navigate Right again and move Up and Down to choose your DAISY book; notice that SpeakOn informs you of the DAISY book name and that it is a DAISY book. To start to play your book, press the 'Select' [Enter] (5) key. The focus moves automatically to the Player control. The DAISY book starts to play. To stop the file playing, press the 'Select' key again.
If you have more than one book in the Library, to select another book, press the 'Focus' key to switch back to the Library control where you can navigate between directories and select another book.
Navigating the Library to other types of books works in a similar way but notice that with books containing a collection of MP3 (or other compressed formats) files, the book name is derived from the folder name where the book is stored.
Like everywhere in SpeakOn, you can navigate books by choosing the navigation unit with the Left and Right keys. With the 'Up' and 'Down' keys, navigate in increments of the navigation unit selected. The navigation units available depend on the type of book as follows:
There are five available units: Media, 5 minutes, 1 minute, 15 seconds and 5 seconds.
The 'Media' unit allows you to choose between book segments (made of MP3 or other format files). With the 5 minutes, 1 minute, 15 seconds and 5 seconds navigation units, you can jump up or down these time increments within a book segment. You can do this after playing has stopped or during playing.
In addition to the time navigation units described above for simple audio books, DAISY books may have up to six levels of navigation; you can choose between these using the Left and Right keys and move to these levels with the Up and Down keys.
There are two DAISY navigation modes:
By default, when a DAISY book is opened, you can change the navigation units in the usual way and navigate up and down and you will hear the different book items; press Enter to start to play - this mode is like any other media in SpeakOn and is probably convenient for non-fiction such as manuals, tutorials etc.
'Navigate and Play' - works in a similar way to a desktop-type hardware DAISY players where when you navigate, the book starts to play automatically and only the audio is active; in other words, there is no announcement of the book item by the speech synthesizer, just relying on the audio. This mode is perhaps more convenient for fiction.
The above modes are a personal choice. To change the DAISY playing mode, go in the menu to:
Settings > Navigate and Play
The default is unchecked; press Enter to check. Your settings are maintained.
You can bookmark books. This operation is explained in
here
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