QUILL Audio Studio User Guide

Version 2.2.0

(There is no Audio Studio 2.0 or 2.1: the Studio adopted the shared Quill family version number when it moved onto the shared runtime, so it went straight from 1.0.0 to 2.2.0. See the release notes for the full story.)

QUILL Audio Studio is audiobook and audio production the way a screen reader user would design it: a small home window whose book list has focus the instant it opens, a wizard that asks one question at a time and announces every step, a chapter editor you drive entirely by ear, and spoken progress for every long run. It runs the exact same Audio Studio code that ships inside the QUILL editor and shares QUILL’s data store, so a voice you configure here reads aloud in QUILL too, and nothing you set up is ever stranded.

Three journeys cover the whole workshop:

Installing and running

The QuillVille Runtime: install Python once, use it everywhere

Every QuillVille app - QUILL, Quill Radio, Quill Weather, and QUILL Audio Studio - now shares one Python runtime, called the QuillVille Runtime. It is installed once per user and reused by all of them. Install it a single time (with any Quill app), and every app you add afterward launches instantly, because the shared runtime is already there.

The runtime is reference-counted: it is removed only when the last app that needs it is uninstalled, so removing one app never leaves the others unable to start.

You choose how much of that runtime to download when you get the Studio. Four editions are offered:

Whenever the runtime is downloaded - by an installer or by an app’s own first launch - it shows a fully accessible progress bar that works with NVDA, JAWS, and Narrator, announcing progress as a percentage. See “Downloading the QuillVille Runtime” below.

The installer

Run the full installer (QUILL-Audio-Studio-Setup-Shared-<version>.exe) or the thin -Lite installer. Either one makes sure the shared QuillVille Runtime is present (installing or downloading it only if it is not) and then installs the Studio to its own folder with a Start Menu group (including a User Guide shortcut) and an uninstaller. Your data lives in the shared Quill store in your Windows profile (%APPDATA%\Quill), the same store QUILL, Quill Radio, and QUILL Cast use. Uninstalling never deletes that shared data, and never removes the shared runtime while another Quill app still needs it.

Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run because this release is not code-signed; choose “More info” then “Run anyway”.

The portable zip

Extract the full portable zip (QUILL-Audio-Studio-Portable-Lean-<version>.zip) anywhere - even a USB stick - and run QuillAudioStudio\QuillAudioStudio.exe. This edition needs no runtime download: it bundles its own genuine, unmodified copy of Python and the offline speech engines, so it runs with no installation and no internet. The portable switch is a data folder next to the exe that contains a storage-mode.json marker file holding {"mode": "portable"}. When that folder and marker are present, all settings, voices, downloaded engines, and your book list live inside the app folder, so the whole studio travels with you. The portable zip ships this marker already in place; the installed copy ships no data folder and uses the shared %APPDATA%\Quill store instead.

Both packaged flavors bundle ffmpeg and the mpv player engine in a tools folder next to the exe, so audiobook building and high-fidelity playback work out of the box.

Downloading the QuillVille Runtime

When you run the Companion edition or the thin installer and the shared runtime is not yet on your machine, the Studio offers to download it - about 230 MB, one time. This download always shows a fully accessible progress bar that works with NVDA, JAWS, and Narrator, whether the download was triggered by the installer or by the app’s own first launch. Progress is announced as a percentage, so you always know how far along it is and never face a silent wait. Once the runtime is installed, this app and every other QuillVille app start instantly, and you are never asked to download it again unless every Quill app has been removed.

A note on antivirus

The Studio’s launcher is now a genuine, tiny native program, and the bundled Python is the official unmodified build. Earlier versions used a renamed and modified copy of Python’s pythonw.exe as the launcher, which some antivirus tools flagged as a false positive. That pattern is completely gone, so the Quill apps are far less likely to be flagged. If an antivirus tool ever does flag a Quill app, it is a false positive; the downloads come from the project’s official releases.

Running from source

From a checkout of the repository:

run-quill-audio-studio-safe-mode.bat launches with Safe Mode on (see “Safe Mode” below).

The home window

The window opens with keyboard focus on your books list. From top to bottom:

The status bar

The status bar reads “Ready - N books in your library” when idle. During a long run it carries per-file progress, and by default the Studio also speaks the 25, 50, and 75 percent milestones so you can follow an overnight narration from another window (turn this off in Preferences).

You can read the bar rather than wait for it to speak. Press F6 to move focus into it, then Left and Right to move between its cells:

Press Enter to act on the cell you are on, use the context menu (Application key, or Shift+F10) for what that cell offers, and press Escape or F6 again to leave the bar and return to the window. View > Show Status Bar hides or shows it, and the Studio remembers your choice.

The Progress text is also written into the system-tray tooltip, so a long run is still reviewable when the window is minimized to the tray.

The library tree

The library fills in as you work: every book you open in the Chapter Workbench joins it, and you can shape it yourself with Favorites and folders. Books are grouped into four built-in collections and any folders you create:

Expand and collapse the groups with Left and Right. Press Enter on a book to open it in the Chapter Workbench. The context menu (Application key, or Shift+F10) is keyboard-complete on both books and folders: Open, Reveal in Folder, Favorite (toggle), Move to Folder, New Folder, and Remove. Reveal in Folder opens your operating system’s file manager (Windows File Explorer, or the macOS Finder) with the book file selected, so you can find it on disk. Remove takes the book out of your library but never touches the file on disk, and says so. The tree remembers which book you had selected when the library reloads.

The Studio wizard

Studio > Open Audio Studio… (Ctrl+N) opens the wizard. Its first page asks the one question that matters - what would you like to make? - and the following steps adapt to your answer. The wizard remembers which journey you used last and pre-selects it.

Wizard mechanics, the same on every page:

The menu items Narrate Documents…, Build From Recordings…, and Edit a Book… are shortcuts into the same wizard (Edit a Book goes straight to a file picker and then the Workbench).

Journey 1: Narrate Documents

Seven steps: Start, What should I read?, Who should read it?, How should chapters work?, Output and diagnostics, Tell me about the book, Review and start.

What should I read?

Who should read it?

How should chapters work?

Output and diagnostics

Tell me about the book

Review and start

The summary reads every choice back in plain sentences; press Back to change any of it. Save a job file… pins this exact run to a portable .quilljob (see “Job files”). Press Start and the run begins in the background: per-file progress in the status bar, spoken milestones at 25, 50, and 75 percent, and the finished book lands in Your books. Cancel (or Escape) stops a run cleanly - the file being synthesized right now finishes first, so you are never left with a half-written audio file, and nothing new is started after it. The diagnostics log records the same chunk-by-chunk detail the progress dialog shows, so reading the log after a run tells you as much as watching it did.

Journey 2: Build From Recordings

Four steps: Start, Where are the recordings?, Tell me about the book, Review and start.

Journey 3: The Chapter Workbench

Open a book three ways: Edit a Book… (a file picker), Studio > Open Book File… (Ctrl+O), or press Enter on a book in Your books. A chaptered MP3, M4B, or M4A opens with its chapters; a file with no chapter markers opens as one big chapter, ready to carve.

The chapter list

Each row reads in full: “3. The Long Road - starts 1:02:03, runs 12:40”. Press Enter on a chapter to hear it. Selecting a chapter loads its title into the Chapter title field - type a new one and press Enter (or the Rename button).

The player

The built-in player anchors everything. All controls are buttons with access keys, fully reachable with Tab and screen-reader-friendly:

The player also remembers your volume and mute choice per book - turn one book down to 40% and mute another, close them, and each reopens at the level you left it.

Playback uses the bundled mpv engine when it is available (gapless audio, exact seeking, instant chapter jumps even on eight-hour books) and quietly falls back to the Windows media engine when it is not - a broken engine can never take playback away.

While a Workbench is open, your media keys drive the active player: Play/Pause, Stop, Next chapter, and Previous chapter work from any window. With no Workbench open they are silent. (Media keys are a Windows feature.)

Chapter surgery

All by ear:

  1. Play until you hear where a boundary belongs, and pause there.
  2. Split at playhead - the chapter is cut in two exactly at the playhead. This is the fix for a book whose chapters landed in the wrong places.
  3. Set start to playhead - retime an existing boundary: select the chapter, park the playhead where it should start, press. The timeline always stays contiguous.
  4. Merge into previous and Restore original (one press undoes every edit) round it out.

Analysis helpers

Both propose, never impose - proposals land in the list for review, and Restore original undoes them.

Import, export, and split

Book details and saving

Title (album), author, narrator, genre, and year are edited right in the dialog.

Saving is honest about physics:

Long saves run in the background so the window stays responsive.

Publish…

Opens the Publish dialog for this book - save your chapter edits first. See “Publishing” below.

Voices

Engines

The Speech Hub

Voices > Speech Hub (Voices and Engines)… is the one place to see and set everything: offline voices on one tab, cloud voices on another, and the speech-recognition (dictation/transcription) engines and models alongside. Pick an engine and voice, adjust rate, volume, or speed, preview, and Set as Default. Voices you configure here are shared with QUILL - and the hub’s “export to audio” action opens the Audio Studio wizard, because in this app that is what export means.

Pronunciation dictionaries

Voices > Pronunciation Dictionaries… opens the same manager QUILL uses to teach the speech engines how to say tricky words - names, acronyms, invented terms. Each entry maps what is written to how it should be spoken, and dictionaries apply as a silent text transform to both narration runs and live Read Aloud. Because this is shared QUILL data, a correction you make here is honoured everywhere the shared store is used.

Voice previews

Every preview speaks the same standard phrase, so voices are directly comparable. When a bundled sample ships for a voice, the preview plays instantly - even before the engine is downloaded. When no sample ships but the engine is installed, the Studio synthesizes the phrase live with the real voice; if that synthesis is taking a moment, you hear “Generating preview, please wait” so silence never leaves you guessing. If neither a sample nor an installed engine is available, the status line says “Download this voice to hear a preview.” Starting a new preview always stops the previous one; previews never overlap.

Generate captions from audio or video

Voices > Generate Captions (Offline)… transcribes an audio or video file into a .srt or .vtt caption file entirely on your own machine - nothing is uploaded. Point it at a recording, a finished chapter, or a video, and it writes captions alongside. It uses the same speech-recognition models as the Studio’s other transcription work, so if none is installed yet it offers to fetch one first (see “Downloading voices, engines, and components”).

Convert audio between formats

Voices > Convert Audio… changes audio files between formats and pulls the audio track out of video files. It uses the ffmpeg the Studio already bundles, so there is nothing extra to install, nothing leaves your machine, and it works in Safe Mode.

The run happens in the background with several files at once, so the window stays responsive, and Cancel works. Progress appears in the status bar’s Progress cell and the tray tooltip, and the spoken summary at the end names any files that failed rather than reporting success for all of them.

Voices > Convert from URL… takes a link - YouTube and the many other sites the downloader supports - fetches its audio, and hands it to the converter. The downloader is not bundled: the first time you use this, the Studio explains what it is about to install and asks, and it reminds you that you are responsible for having the right to the audio you download. Unavailable in Safe Mode.

Downloading voices, engines, and components

Everything heavy downloads on demand, with progress and a working Cancel:

If a component install fails, the Studio offers to save a diagnostics bundle - a small, redacted zip you can send to support so the failure can be read without exposing anything private.

All downloads are disabled in Safe Mode.

AI features

Set Up AI

AI > Set Up AI… runs a short, jargon-free wizard: choose how AI should run - a cloud provider with your own key (paste it, test it) or a local model via Ollama (nothing leaves your machine) - and you land ready to go. Nothing is applied until you confirm, and you can cancel at any point with nothing lost.

One configured provider powers three things in this app:

All AI features are unavailable in Safe Mode.

Publishing

Publish a Finished Book

Book Tools > Publish a Finished Book… asks for the book file (pre-selecting the book highlighted in Your books) and opens the Publish dialog. The Workbench’s Publish… button opens the same dialog for the book you are editing. Three explicit, consent-first paths:

Make a Podcast Feed From a Folder

Book Tools > Make a Podcast Feed From a Folder… runs a whole show from one folder. Every MP3, M4B, or M4A master becomes an episode (oldest file = episode 1), with its title from its tags or your per-episode override and your per-episode description, edited in an accessible list. The show settings (title, author, description, media URL base, feed URL, cover URL) persist in the folder itself, so after each new build one press of Write feed.rss now regenerates the complete feed. Write show notes page produces an accessible show-notes.html beside it. Everything here is local file IO; uploading is the SFTP destination’s job.

All publishing is unavailable in Safe Mode.

ACX Compliance Check

Book Tools > ACX Compliance Check… measures any audio file - not just books built here - against the ACX submission window: integrated loudness (target -20 LUFS plus or minus 3), true peak (max -3 dBFS), and noise floor (max -60 dBFS). A passing file is told so plainly; a failing one gets a concrete recommendation per criterion (“make the recording 5.8 dB quieter”). The measurement runs in the background and needs ffmpeg; if ffmpeg is missing the app points you at Voices > Get FFmpeg… first.

Job files

A .quilljob file pins an entire run - folder, voices, rotation and casting, chapters, output, mastering, and book details - in a small, portable, hand-editable text file.

Keep one job file per project, or edit one in any text editor between runs. Loading a job from the Studio menu behaves exactly like loading it in the wizard - just one dialog sooner.

Book Tools

Two listening aids live on the Book Tools menu:

Mute (Ctrl+M) is also on the Book Tools menu - same as the Mute button in the player.

The Studio menu

Two items on the Studio menu track your listening across launches:

Preferences

Studio > Preferences… (Ctrl+Comma):

These preferences are stored in a small app-local file, so the shared settings QUILL wrote stay exactly as QUILL wrote them. Speech settings (engine, voices, rates) deliberately stay in the shared store - configure a voice here and QUILL reads aloud with it too.

The system tray

QUILL Audio Studio’s icon is three white-and-gold waveform bars on a dark slate tile. If you have used an earlier build, this is new: the Studio used to share Quill Radio’s blue broadcast-wave icon, so on a desktop with more than one QuillVille app installed several of them looked identical. Every app in the family now has its own - the same rounded tile shape and the same gold accent throughout, but its own colour and its own picture each.

While minimized to the tray the Studio keeps running - a long narration continues with the window tucked away. Right-click (or keyboard-invoke) the tray icon for:

Double-click the tray icon to bring the window back.

Announcements: how the Studio tells you things

Everything the Studio announces - “Ready”, a run milestone, a finished conversion, a warning - goes out on four channels at once, so you hear or feel it in whichever way you actually work:

Announcements are also recorded as they happen, so a message that went past while you were reading something else is not simply gone.

These settings are shared with QUILL rather than repeated in the Studio’s own Preferences, so set them once in QUILL’s Preferences (Accessibility) and they apply here too: whether to show announcements in braille, the braille style (the full spoken wording, or a compact position-first form), how long an identical braille message is held back, whether an error stays on the display instead of flashing past, whether the companion apps play sound cues, whether a cue stands in for speech while Quiet Mode is on, and which severities interrupt speech.

Checking for updates

Help > Check for Updates… compares your version with the newest Quill release, works out which download matches the flavor you run (the installer for an installed copy, the portable zip for a portable one), and fetches it with spoken progress. Then choose Install and restart now and the Studio does the rest itself: it applies the update - unpacking the new portable files over your folder, or running the installer quietly - and relaunches, keeping every setting, voice, and saved listening position. There is nothing to unzip and no folder to swap by hand.

All the Quill apps are published from one place, and each one recognizes its own download, so an update to Quill Radio is never offered to the Studio and each app updates on its own schedule. The automatic startup check (on by default, throttled to once a day) is silent unless it actually finds something.

The Command Palette

Help > Command Palette… (Ctrl+Shift+P) lists every Studio command in one searchable list: the three journeys, Open Job File, Publish, the podcast feed, the ACX check, Sleep Timer, Mute Playback, Play Queue, the Speech Hub, Pronunciation Dictionaries, Generate Captions, Convert Audio, Convert from URL, model and component downloads, AI setup, Preferences, and Check for Updates. Type a few letters, arrow to the command, press Enter.

Quillins

Quillins are QUILL’s small, sandboxed, permission-gated add-ons. They run in QUILL, Quill Radio, and QUILL Cast today; Audio Studio does not offer a Quillins menu yet. The groundwork is in place - an add-on can declare that it contributes an extra step to the Studio’s audio processing, such as a loudness pass at the mastering stage, and a sample add-on demonstrates exactly that - but the Studio does not load add-ons in this version. When it does, they will be off in Safe Mode like everywhere else.

Keyboard reference

Action Key
Open Audio Studio (the wizard) Ctrl+N
Open Book File Ctrl+O
Preferences Ctrl+Comma
Command Palette Ctrl+Shift+P
Move focus to the status bar (and back out) F6
Open selected book (in Your books) Enter
Remove selected book from the list Delete
Play selected chapter (Workbench list) Enter
Rename chapter (Workbench title field) Enter
Mute (player / shell) Ctrl+M
Media Play/Pause (when a Workbench is open) Media key
Media Stop (when a Workbench is open) Media key
Media Next chapter (when a Workbench is open) Media key
Media Previous chapter (when a Workbench is open) Media key
Studio menu Alt+S
Book Tools menu Alt+B
Voices menu Alt+V
AI menu Alt+A
Help menu Alt+H

Every button and field in the wizard, the Workbench, and the dialogs also has an access key (underlined letter), reachable with Alt plus that letter while the surface has focus.

Safe Mode

Set the environment variable QUILL_SAFE_MODE=1 or pass --safe-mode (or use run-quill-audio-studio-safe-mode.bat). Safe Mode disables AI features, publishing, and component downloads; everything local - narration with installed engines, the Workbench, saving - keeps working. Use it to isolate a problem or to run on a machine where network features are unwelcome.

Sharing data with QUILL

The Studio reads and writes the same data store as QUILL, Quill Radio, and QUILL Cast: %APPDATA%\Quill for an installed copy, or the data folder next to the exe (marked by a storage-mode.json file holding {"mode": "portable"}) for a portable one. Shared between the apps:

Only the handful of window-behavior preferences above are app-local. Uninstalling the Studio never deletes the shared data.

Getting help

Support is run by Community Access, and the address is support@community-access.org. A person reads it, and replies come back by email.

The quickest way there is Help > Get Help from Support… (Ctrl+Alt+F2), which every app in the family answers with the same form: what kind of message this is, a subject, what happened, and – if you want an answer – an email address to reply to. What you expected and how to reproduce it are optional, and worth more than anything else when you can give them.

Press Send and your own mail program opens with the whole message already written, addressed to support, with Quill Audio Studio’s name and version and your Windows version filled in at the bottom. Nothing is sent until you send it there, so you can read it over, add anything, or change your mind.

If this machine has no mail program set up – webmail only, say – the app puts the whole message on your clipboard and tells you the address, so nothing you typed is lost. And writing to support@community-access.org yourself always works just as well: there is no form you have to use. Say which app you were using and what happened.

Troubleshooting

Two Help items are worth knowing before anything else goes wrong. Help > View Log… opens the Studio’s own log, so you can read what happened during a run instead of guessing. Help > Save Diagnostics… writes a small, redacted zip - the log plus what the Studio can tell about your machine and settings, with anything private scrubbed - which is exactly what to attach to a bug report. Help > Get Help from Support… (Ctrl+Alt+F2) writes to a person for you, already tagged with this app’s name and version.