earmark audio

Step 2: a source or a Markdown file becomes an MP3.

earmark audio SOURCE [voice options] [audio options] [behaviour options]
              [metadata options] [cleaning options]

Writes audio/<name>.mp3 in the library, and the Markdown alongside it, so you can go back and fix something without re-extracting. Does not touch the feed.

Arguments

Argument	Means
`SOURCE`	a file path, a Markdown file, or a URL

A Markdown file carrying earmark: cleaned is narrated verbatim. Anything else goes through the cleaner first.

Voice options

Shared with publish.

Flag	Default	Means
`-v`, `--voice VOICE`	`af_heart`	see `earmark voices`
`-s`, `--speed SPEED`	`1.0`	0.5 to 2.0
`--lang LANG`	`en-us`	language code
`--model {full,fp16,int8}`	`full`	Kokoro model variant
`--engine {kokoro,say}`	`kokoro`	speech backend

fp16 and int8 are smaller and faster and sound worse. --engine say uses macOS’s built-in say and needs no model at all, useful for checking that a long document chunks and encodes before committing to a real render.

Audio options

Flag	Default	Means
`--bitrate BITRATE`	`64k`	MP3 bitrate
`--sample-rate SAMPLE_RATE`	`44100`	output sample rate
`--no-title-card`	off	don’t speak the title and author first

Behaviour options

Flag	Default	Means
`--dry-run`	off	report chunk count and estimated duration, synthesize nothing
`--play`	off	open the file when it is done
`-q`, `--quiet`	off	no progress bar
`--no-cache`	off	ignore and don’t write the chunk cache
`--refresh`	off	re-extract and re-synthesize, ignoring what is already in the library

--dry-run costs nothing and answers “how long is this going to be?” before you spend the compute.

--refresh is the flag for “the extraction changed, do it all again”. --no-cache is narrower: it skips the per-chunk cache for this run only.

Metadata options

Flag	Means
`--title TITLE`	override the detected title
`--author AUTHOR`	override the detected author
`--date DATE`	override the detected date (`YYYY-MM-DD`)

Cleaning options

Identical to earmark text: --profile, --tables, --keep-references, --keep-citations, --keep-links, --say-code, --drop-sections, --skip-front-matter, --keep-front-matter. They are ignored for a Markdown file that already carries earmark: cleaned.

Examples

earmark audio paper.pdf --dry-run
earmark audio paper.pdf --voice af_bella --speed 1.1
earmark audio text/some-paper.md --play
earmark audio chapter.epub --profile book --bitrate 96k

Notes

The first run prompts before downloading the 354 MB Kokoro model. After every run the chunk cache prunes itself: entries untouched for 90 days go, then least recently used above 2 GB.