Need help

Hello brothers, how can I have both at the same time? The time of the audio traveled and the highlighting in the text? It would be very interesting if that were possible.


Dear Antonio,

Making the text highlight in yellow as the audio is played is a feature of SAB that is setup using timing files. It is explained in the SAB documentation file here
If you read the documentation carefully you should be able to create the timing files. Then it is a matter of adding those timing files to audio tab in SAB. You can also find this document and others in the Help tab inside SAB.

After you add the audio files, you should build the app and see how precise the timings are. If the highlighting is lagging the audio, it will be distracting to users, and you will need to tweak the aeneas settings for more accurate timings. But with a language similar to Spanish if you set the pronunciation to Spanish or the default, I think it will work well.

Did Faith Comes by Hearing record your audio during the last few years. If they did then they can help you build the app with timings they have in the recording.

You also need to choose if you want the highlighting be shorter phrases or whole sentences. This depends on how familiar your app users are with reading. Audiences that are poorer readers may benefit from phrase level timings to improve their reading. They probably need to slow down the audio speed to the speed they can read. If your users are average or better readers, they probably will appreciate sentence level timing more, since it is less distracting with the yellow highlighting changing less frequently. You can’t have both phrase level and sentence level in the same app. You could build 2 versions of the app though, one with phrase level highlighting for learning readers, and the other version with sentence/verse level highlighting for more fluent readers.

Although the highlighting is a very impressive feature when people first see it, I have not observed that users here in SE Asia where I work actually find it that helpful. I think the most significant advantage of highlighting is that often when someone starts the audio, they do not know where to look to start reading. The highlighting helps by showing their eyes where to read. But I find if I am watching the yellow block move along, I might not be paying attention to the actual words being read. For this reason, and because some users don’t like the highlighting there is a setting in the app where users can turn it off. You can decide if you want it on or off when a person first installs the app. I recommend setting it to on by default, so people can see the feature and then decide if they want it or not.

Hope this helps you. Post again if you need further help.

Roger Green, SIL Thailand

Thanks for the reply brother, I understand what you said. but what I really want is for the audio time to be shown in the bar at the bottom where the audio advance controls are. and shows the highlight in the text. for the user to see the audio timing and also the highlight in the text. Thanks for the answer.

@antonio_araujo, you are right that the slider only appears when there are no timing files. We will make a note of this as a possible enhancement - to allow the slider to be shown even when there are timing files.

Yes I’m sure, when placing the highlight on the text, it is not possible to see the size of the audio and the progress of reading the text in the audio. Thank you for your attention, congratulations on your work.