Well after 2 hours I managed to do it. Basically, I have created an Mp3 of an episode of Full Metal Alchemist and through the means below converted a subtitle file down to something resembling a novel text with Furigana with brackets for my iPhone.

1st) I bought the DVDs and converted the video to my PC. You could use an AVI or MKV from the internet, but I think, as it's not super expensive, that it's nice to have the DVD as it supports the artists, etc.

2nd) As I converted the file to AVI, I used DVDVideoSoft's "Free Video to MP3" tool to convert the AVI to a high quality mp3.

3rd) I went to http://kitsunekko.net/subtitles/japanese/ and download the Japanese subtitle file (which as it isn't a .srt file, so I had to convert it to .srt using VobSub's "Subresync" - simply 'open' and 'save' as .srt).

4th) I opened the .srt in notepad and removed the timestamps by simply clicking "edit" on the menu then "replace" and adding "1" in the 'find what' search bar and leaving the 'replace with' search bar clear and then hit "Replace All". I repeated this for numbers "2-10" and any punctuation marks in the text, which removed all of the numbers and odd punctuation that comes with timestamps.

5th) Now you have just Japanese text and spaces. TO KEEP THE SPACES BETWEEN LINES DO NOT DO THIS. Next, cut and paste the whole text into your google search bar on your web browser and paste it back into whatever version of Microsoft Word you have (you now have no spaces between lines). I did this on Firefox.

6th) You can then add 。(full stops) by showing "the hidden punctuation characters" in whatever version of Word you have and again, pasting in the punctuation mark to your "find what" column and adding 。to your "replace with" search bar. See Microsoft link below.

7th) This gives you a nice looking book format.

8th) To add furigana (in brackets like this). Go to: http://nihongo.j-talk.com/kanji/ and select "Readings in brackets" and "Hiragana by Default" or whatever you like. (It won't post on to your iPhone/iPod's lyrics sheet if you try the furigana mode as word just won't accept it.) Paste your text and translate (it has a character limit, so do it in parts). This website adds furigana, etc. to Japanese text.

9th) Click copy under the menu section on the right. Now paste it to your Word Document and your done.

10th) I don't use Itunes. I use Copytransfer, so, for me, I just select "audiobook" under filing and cut and paste the lyrics. If you have a jailbroken phone you can do this too. Otherwise: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1456 explains how. To convert to audio book in Itunes do this: http://lifehacker.com/5064539/itunes-8-m...-audiobook and you should have an audio book, although I don't know for sure as I don't use Itunes for this.

Congratulations
What doing all of this gives you is a book you can rewind by 30 seconds and slow or speed up as needed with the text in front of you and readings for everything. (You could even have Romanji if you haven't really covered kana properly yet - lol, ok, if you haven't you should probably do that first.)

The Next Step Up
Mission: Use an audio splitter to cut the file down to 10-12 parts (2-3 minutes each) and use "Detailed word info" + the relevant portion of the text I created to create an even more meaningful text (obviously have the vocab with the correct word [or close enough - obviously you could find the English subs and check the translation to make sure that you are close to the correct meaning.])

An example might be:

http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/nms/netanotane/post_1332.html

Just the nouns, verbs and adverbs (short example):

‘Word’ Reading English Base Info
パナソニック Panasonic
パナソニック organization
月 ツキつき (2) month
日 ニチにち counter for days 日 noun
発売 ハツバイはつばい sale; offering for sale; release (for sale); launch (product)
オープン オープンオープン open オープン
価格 カカクかかく price; value; cost

「エバーレッズ」((()パナソニック3(3)月(つき)18(18)日(にち)発売(はつばい)オープン価格(かかく))())LED(LED)電球(でんきゅう)は、

That was all cut and paste. I think you could probably do it more easily posting into excel or word.

See here to help you with formatting marks: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-h...02250.aspx

Note: You don't need an iphone just the audio and a print out of your mini-script. Easy.

Disclaimer: Yes, it probably uses Edict for this and that's not so perfect, as we all know, but it's better than nothing. Also, if a word is obviously wrong you can just 1/2 speed it and replay it 100 odd times to get a reading for your dictionary or ignore it and maybe ○○ the word in the lyrics. Finally, everyone has different OSs and tools. Probably what works for me won't for you, but ask in this post and I'm sure someone can help.

I think this is a good step up for anyone who has watched an Anime to death with English subs or is looking to shift up from kids audio books to slightly more adult content. The stage up from this would be to use dramas targeting specific topics (http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/subtitles.php#Japanese or http://www.plala.or.jp/ban/nanase0101.html) and news casts with exact transcripts.

This would be super cool on the iPad. I'm off to read my Audiobook, laterz.

So you're keeping the full length audio, blank spaces and all? Even for shounen anime like fullmetal alchemist, which has long scenes where they are just grunting at each other?

While you've got all the timing information, why not use that to get rid of all the audio where people aren't actually talking?

Saaay, feed it into subs2srs and then splice it back together again?

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! I didn't think of that. Could you explain how, please, Hereticalrants. That would make my book vastly better! (I've never used Subs2srs.)

Surprisingly easy. Thanks for that. I found that, as I'm using the audio from the video from my DVDs the timing is slightly out and you lose things like ぞ and だ on the end of sentences. Probably I could allow a little extra time on either side of the split to fix this (if this is possible).

I think this is a great option though. I want to start doing it once I figure it out totally and once I have listened through the whole recording a few times as is. I think it does tend to jump forward too quickly. I think perhaps a bit of empty audio (maybe a no noise MP3 between different sections of the audio when characters move from new situation to situation) would help here.

To change the text back to each part of the dialogue on a separate line, in word do this:

Find what: 。
Replace with: 。＾p

This adds a paragraph in where every full stop was while retaining the full stop.

(I found it is a bit hard to read using the format I suggested above at my level. I need the line breaks to keep up.)

Cranks Wrote:3rd) I went to http://kitsunekko.net/subtitles/japanese/ and download the Japanese subtitle file (which as it isn't a .srt file, so I had to convert it to .srt using VobSub's "Subresync" - simply 'open' and 'save' as .srt).

4th) I opened the .srt in notepad and removed the timestamps by simply clicking "edit" on the menu then "replace" and adding "1" in the 'find what' search bar and leaving the 'replace with' search bar clear and then hit "Replace All". I repeated this for numbers "2-10" and any punctuation marks in the text, which removed all of the numbers and odd punctuation that comes with timestamps.

Might be faster if you opened the sub files in Aegisub and did export to .txt file.

Cranks Wrote:Surprisingly easy. Thanks for that. I found that, as I'm using the audio from the video from my DVDs the timing is slightly out and you lose things like ぞ and だ on the end of sentences. Probably I could allow a little extra time on either side of the split to fix this (if this is possible).

I think this is a great option though. I want to start doing it once I figure it out totally and once I have listened through the whole recording a few times as is. I think it does tend to jump forward too quickly. I think perhaps a bit of empty audio (maybe a no noise MP3 between different sections of the audio when characters move from new situation to situation) would help here.

If you decide to use subs2srs to create the audio clips, you use the "Pad Timings" option so that you don't lose the end of the sentence.

Also, don't know if you're aware of balloonguy's interactive audiobook tool (I call it 'Kage Shibari', for 'controlled shadowing'). Not sure if it works in Safari (I believe it does but I've never tried it). But in Firefox if you're using it, you can use it in combination with the Furigana Injector/HTML Ruby extensions so that you have proper furigana (you must check the 'text in links' box in Furigana Injector's addon options).

Link to the tool: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid117594 (First link)

Link to example using .ogg and .trs file (using .ogg in this example but I think the type of media file required depends on browser, in part. And .trs is what Transcriber creates, but Kage Shibari can use all manner of files including .srt and .ass):

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...3#pid95243 (Sorry it's cryptic in my usual style. Make sure to grab updated .trs from the link in the Edit at the bottom of the comment.)

So basically, if you're using Firefox and want to read the example above with furigana above the kanji compounds:

1) Make sure Furigana Injector/HTML Ruby addons installed. Check 'text in links' box in FI options.

2) If you aren't using the dropbox link balloonguy provided i.e. using Kage Shibari remotely, and instead have it saved as a complete local file (i.e. with folder), then open it in Firefox.

3) For the media, if it's offline (i.e. a saved .ogg file), then paste in the file:///path and click Load, and beneath that, make sure 'local' is selected and Browse to the .trs file (.trs in this example).

4) Right-click and select Furigana and inject the whole page.

5) Hit play and read (or just click the title/initial text). Click the text whenever you want to replay or skip to that section.

6) Fluency??

Yeah I never wrote a step-by-step for this before, sorry to sticking it in your thread. ^_^

Bonus: Rikaichan also works with this, of course. Just checked (because I use Lingoes/Stardict rather than Rikaichan).

And of course this works for video, as well (likewise depending on encoding). The video will be unsubtitled off to the top-right or something, so you can just read+listen and ignore the visual or watch and ignore subtitles, when you like.

Edit: With Firefox, you may find that you can't use mp3 files, and that the .ogg file is a few ms off. If that's bothersome, I have found that Chrome will play either format just fine, but mp3s have the perfect timing (according to how you the .trs was timed originally). Except you'll need to paste in the .trs data rather than load it. I'll probably be using Chrome from now on with Kage Shibari.

i don't quite get what the person's trying to say but i think it would be more efficient to run sub2srs with the audio to get the audio parts with just the dialogue (cutting out the part with the theme song or background music, basically silence..) instead of splitting to 2-3 minute parts.

i posted about it here
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2576&page=3
basically run sub2srs and get the audio files, then join the audio files. what you get is pure dialogue which is unbelievably amazing especially with those dramas where they pause like crazy.

but then maybe it's not ideal for this since it would cut out the pauses in the dialogue making it hard to follow your audio book with the audio??

Hey, all this looks really good! I wonder if anyone would be interested in summarising it and putting it up on the wiki? There seems to be a few ways to skin this cat.

cheers