WorkAudioBook

Anyone can use WorkAudioBook to simply listen and enjoy an MP3 audio book, but this full-featured audio player is actually an excellent tool to improve your foreign-language lessons.

This is because it allows you to display synchronized text in the form of subtitles stored in an HTML, TXT, or SRT file. Besides, it comes with extra learning tools that will help you practice and improve your vocabulary.

Actually, synchronized text and audio is not only useful to those learning or practising a foreign language – it has proved to be of great use for those with a visual impairment, dyslexia, or other print disabilities. Actually, this concept is at the basis of the DAISY/EPUB standard for structured audio books. Reading a text while listening to it (or vice versa) has proven to be an excellent exercise to fix in our minds the correspondence between a word and its pronunciation, especially with those languages where what you see is “not” what you get.

To reinforce its usefulness in the language-learning field, WorkAudioBook comes with a series of extra tools and features that will allow you to bookmark your favorite or especially-hard-to-get passages, repeat a phrase as many times as needed, edit your subtitles (or even create new ones), apply notes to a folder or an MP3 file, and add tags to them. You can test your spelling capabilities by writing the playing phrase and let the program do the spell checking for you. Additionally, you can create your personal list of tricky, confusing, or simply new words that you think require extra effort.

Both the audio waveform graph and the subtitles support zooming – again, the possibility of reading the text using large fonts can be of great help for those users with some kind of visual disability. You can select a fragment of the audio simply by dragging your mouse pointer along the waveform, and all the text that corresponds to this fragment will be also displayed in the subtitles box. These subtitles can be easily edited without leaving the program – not only you can change the text or correct a typo in a given phrase, but you can also fix some basic synchronization issues with this simple tool. The entire interface is a pleasure to play with – it is clean, with oversized buttons for the most common playback functions, and an optional tabbed menu that contains all the extra functionality mentioned above.

Regardless of why you would like to use WorkAudioBook – be it to enhance your language-learning skills, be it to improve your reading experience, be it to understand better the text you are reading, etc. – this audio player offers you a set of utilities and features that you will not easily find in other similar tools. Though it needs registration, this is a completely free tool more than worth having installed in your system.