Available here: Login - LingQ
To the best of my knowledge, it’s 100% copyright legitimate:
- The audio is from Librivox (LibriVox);
- The text is from Projekt Gutenberg (Der Hund der Baskervilles);
- …and the thumbnail was made in the AI art generator Stable Diffusion.
Remember, folks: always look for Creative Commons and/or public domain permissions. Just because you can access it, doesn’t necessarily mean you can use it. Let’s not put LingQ at risk by uploading copyrighted material.
It’s amazing what you can achieve with AI art generation at the moment. Here’s the prompt image I made:
…and here’s the result:
For the most part, the Projekt Gutenberg text corresponds very well with the excellent audio reading from Librivox. One of the downsides of classic literature is that there may be several translations of the same work, which is very much the case with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although the Librivox audio and Gutenberg text are faithful to each other for the vast majority of the story, bizarrely, they went at a complete tangent to one another at the very end. Very confusing!
To solve this problem, I fed the divergent audio from Librivox into the speech-to-text software which is very popular on the forums at the moment (https://freesubtitles.ai/). Then I proof-read it against the text from which the Librivox reading was taken (Der Hund von Baskerville : Arthur Conan Doyle : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive). This was no mean feat, as this made from scans of a version written in black letter gothic / Frakturschrift!
