Open source / AGPL-3.0 Coming soon
txtCaster
A local-first book-to-audio studio. Point it at a PDF or EPUB, pick a voice, and it produces a real audiobook on your own machine. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.
Two ways to listen
Narrator mode
Reads the text faithfully, word for word, in the voice you choose.
Teacher mode
Uses a local language model to re-explain the material as a lecture in its own words, turning a dense textbook chapter into something you can absorb on a walk.
What it does
Scope and control
- Import PDF and EPUB books into a local library
- Convert selected chapters or exact page ranges, not the whole book
- Pick and preview a voice before committing to a long conversion
Output
- Real MP3 files with chapter markers and EBU R128 loudness normalization
- Spoken figure and chart descriptions with an optional local vision model
- Built-in player with seeking, skip, adjustable speed, and a mini player
Long jobs
- Pause and resume: conversions checkpoint as they go
- Hardware profiling with up-front time estimates and model fit indicators
- Overnight queue that keeps the machine awake until the job is done
Models
- Nothing bundled: you choose what to install, from a 60 MB voice up
- Resumable downloads, each verified by SHA256 checksum
- Non-commercial model licenses clearly marked, never selected by default
Private by architecture
The conversion pipeline is fully offline. Documents are processed on your machine and never uploaded. There is no telemetry, no analytics, and no account system. The application touches the network only for model downloads and catalog refreshes that you initiate, and every download is verified by SHA256 checksum before use.
On the roadmap
A follow-along reading view with synchronized word highlighting, voice cloning, macOS support, and an interactive voice tutor: an explicitly opt-in mode where you talk to your book, ask questions mid-listen, jump to a chapter by voice, or have a section summarized, using your own API keys or running fully locally. Today txtCaster is an audiobook producer and an audio player; the project says plainly what it is not yet.