Post #4568727 · Elektrine

2026-08-29 18:13 UTC

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space you've put me in quite the predicament, because on one hand VoiceDream has become increasingly terrible while Android still has some usable options, and I'd like to help test a worthy replacement on iOS. On the other, I suspect you'll have fewer Android testers, and I need an excuse to use it more. I might just have to have fanfiction on one device and everything else on another. Also, I literally just installed it and loaded an epub, but whatever you've done with TTS rendering is pretty neat. It pauses and resumes in the middle of words, so I'm guessing you render it a bit ahead of playback and then use your own audio system, which is a neat way to avoid a lot of the annoying pauses/glitches in other apps.

Replies (1)

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space 2026-08-29 18:35

@simon@procrastodon.net Spot on! Instead of letting iOS handle playback directly, I use AVSpeechSynthesizer purely as a speech renderer writing raw PCM audio buffers into memory, which then feed into a custom AVAudioEngine pipeline, which aggressively prefetches multiple paragraphs ahead (and behind for instant rewinds) to survive iOS throttling background synthesis when the screen is locked, resamples them to the hardware rate, and pre-arms the next buffer directly onto the audio node while the current one is still playing. That last one is also why transport controls like pausing and resuming mid-word feel instant. Say what you will about Voice Dream, but at least prior to it getting bought, have hardly used it since, it was the only app I ever saw get this right, and I wanted Paperback to as well. Android testing on your part would definitely be nice, but both of the primary Paperback developers use android as our daily devices, so that one has gotten more testing by nature of us relying on it.

Open ##4568726