Obi 4.8 , released on October 20, 2022
Obi 4.8 continues to address the needs of DAISY members. It introduces higher sampling rates of 48 kHz and 96 kHz for higher audio quality, commands for trimming trailing silence from sections for making production more efficient, option to customize the override behaviour for the Preview before Recording command, along with other improvements and bug fixes.
The new features and enhancements of Obi 4.8 release are briefed below. For feedback, comments and bug reports please contact us via email: obi.feedback@gmail.com.
Please note that support for Windows XP is deprecated from Obi 4.0 onwards. The users of Windows XP are requested to install Obi 3.9.1.
Highlights of Obi 4.8 release
New sampling rates introduced for enhanced audio quality
This release comes with the ability to choose the sample rates 48000 Hz and 96000 Hz for your project in addition to the existing sample rates. These higher sample rates ensure better audio quality but take more disk space. Obi’s backend and audio engine has been refactored for supporting these higher quality sampling rates. You can select these sample rates from the Audio Settings dialog while creating a new project.
Trim trailing silence more efficiently
If there is silence at the end of a section, readers will experience a lag while listening to the contents of the book. You can trim this trailing silence more efficiently from the end of sections using new commands provided in the submenu of Trim silence from section end under Sections menu or the context menu. You can apply these commands on single section, multiple sections, or entire project. The commands are also available in Multi-section Operations dialog.
Option to customize override behaviour for Preview before recording command
You can instruct the Preview before recording command to override audio of current phrase or audio of all subsequent phrases of the section. The Audio tab of the Preferences dialog has a new checkbox Delete following phrases while doing preview before recording that lets you disable deletion of the phrases following the phrase being recorded.
You can find help on the functionality of these features in the “What’s New?” page of Obi Help, which can be viewed by clicking on the Help contents menu item under Help menu of Obi.
List of some major bugs fixed & behaviour changes made in this release:
- If a section of the project was empty, Trim silence from end of all sections command threw an exception.
- Trim silence from end of all sections command was not able to identify the silence at the end of the last section of the project.
- Improper phrase role was assigned on merging a skippable phrase with the silence phrase. Now if a skippable phrase is merged with silence phrase, the role of skippable phrase will be retained.
List of some major bugs fixed & behaviour changes made in 4.8 beta release:
- The reading order of audio files in MP3 players was distorted if the count of the sections exported by Obi exceeded 1,000.
- When a phrase was selected in the Content View, and Escape key was pressed to move the selection to the section, it made the tab order of the phrases unpredictable.
- The alignment of the user interface has been fixed for different localizations.
- Provided warning message that gets displayed when user tries to import an audio file from the project directory of the current project.
For complete list of fixed bugs please visit fixed issues page
Download
To download Obi 4.8 please visit download page.
Known limitation
There are some limitations in this release. The team is working consciously towards resolving them. Please visit the known limitations page to know more about them.
Support
If you would like to discuss some Obi feature or report a bug, you can send an email to obi.feedback@gmail.com or file issue on Obi issue tracker. To verify if the bug has already been submitted, please see the list of reported bugs.