Gutenberg CW

This is a shell script which

1. Fetches books in different languages from Project Gutenberg
2. Selects random lines from the books
3. Converts these lines to morse code in MP3 format at different speeds

This is useful for training CW on semi-random text: parts of sentences make sense, but language changes continuously and within sentences.

Just give me the MP3s

Plenty of material on different speeds is available at https://github.com/camilstaps/Gutenberg-CW/releases. Let me know if you need more, different settings or so, and are unable to generate the files yourself - I will upload some more then.

Usage

For the first time, use:

./genlib.sh new

This may take a while. After that, you can remove the cache directory (which contains the entire Gutenberg catalogue listing) and simply use:

./genlib.sh

This will use the same books as before, but select different random lines. To fetch new books, use ./genlib.sh new again (which will need to download the whole catalogue again, in case you removed it).

Configuration

Options can be set at the top of the script:

Book Settings

• LANGS: the languages to select books from
• FILESPERLANG: how many books to pick per language
• LINECOUNT: how many lines to select from all the books

CW Settings

• WPMS: a list of the character speeds to generate
• EWPMS: a list of the effective character speeds (spacing speed)
• FREQ: the frequency tone
• DURATION: the duration per MP3 file in seconds (approximately; the sentence will be finished)

MP3 Settings

• AUTHOR: the ID3 author tag
• ALBUM: the ID3 album tag (the WPM and EWPM are appended, such that an album title CW Book will become e.g. CW Book (20/12 wpm))
• TITLE: the ID3 title tag (the nr. of the file is appended, such that a title CW Book will become e.g. CW Book - 2)
• FILENAME: the filename (the nr. is appended, such that a filename book will become e.g. book0002.mp3)

Acknowledgements

Converting text to CW is done using Fabian Kurz's ebook2cw.

Copyright and license

This script was written by Camil Staps PD7LOL. It is hereby released into the public domain.