Importing new ebooks is suddenly producing arbitrary line breaks that are messing with auto-generated audio

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Hi! I’ve imported many, many ebooks to LingQ over the last couple of years, and generated audio to accompany them. That’s why I got a premium subscription. Just recently I’ve noticed that LingQ is inserting arbitrary line breaks into paragraphs when importing them. This formatting doesn’t seem to exist in the original texts.

LingQ’s auto-generated audio is treating these line breaks as full stops, causing herky-jerky audio narration while reading the texts. The voice halts suddenly in mid-sentence when there is no punctuation to trigger such an event, pauses, and then continues narrating the sentence. The auto-generated audio has always been a bit iffy for me, but this new situation is making it even more distracting and annoying to use.

I uploaded two different books last night that are showing this same behavior. The last batch I uploaded a few weeks ago didn’t do this, nor did any before then. Like most people, I prefer human-voiced audio, but LingQ’s TTS was endurable and not too distracting before now.

What changed? Can this please be fixed? Even if LingQ were inserting arbitrary line breaks into texts before, the TTS wasn’t treating them as full-stop punctuation, creating this herky-jerky audio.

I haven’t tested it on other languages yet, but this is happening with French TTS using imported texts on the Brave and Chrome browsers.

Thanks for your attention.

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Replying to myself to provide more information:

I imported two more books just now and checked the “Edit lesson” section for them. One book imported normally – producing normal audio, and one had the weird line breaks again, due to abnormal paragraph structure. It’s weird that this has only started recently, and that I haven’t encountered it before. I wonder if converting the ebooks from one format to another has caused this issue, or could fix it. I have been uploading them in the epub format.

I really don’t want to have to go in and fix the line breaks manually in the “Edit lesson” section for the problematic ones, since one of the books is over 1,000 pages long in epub format.

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Convert epub files to .txt with calibre before importing them into lingq to fix annoying line breaks and improve audio

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Thanks. We will investigate the issue.

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I will try the TXT conversion trick. I’d never encountered this before – after uploading many dozens of books, and then it hit me 3 times in 2 days.

Thanks to @Lunaagharna and @zoran!

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