Creating an audiobook (.m4b) with FFmpeg

Following on from my previous TTS post using Chatterbox Turbo (or any other TTS like Kokoro or Qwen3-TTT), here is code to combine audio files in a single .m4b audiobook retaining author and title metadata, chapter markers, and a cover image. Mostly this is a Python wrapper to FFmpeg. ...

15 Feb 2026

Chatterbox Turbo TTS with MLX-Audio

In my last post, I tried Qwen3-TTS… This time, I test Chatterbox Turbo by Resemble.ai, which is an open-source, MIT licensed, text-to-speech model with zero-shot cloning. ...

10 Feb 2026

Qwen3-TTS with MLX-Audio on macOS

Alibaba’s Qwen3-TTS for Speech Synthesis (text-to-speech) was open-sourced (Apache-2.0) on 22 Jan 2026. And within the last couple of weeks, we now have Apple Silicon optimization via MLX-Audio. Here is code to create an audiobook from an ePub. ...

2 Feb 2026

Updating CrossOver to GamePorting Toolkit 3.0

The current version of CrossOver 25.1.1 utilizes with Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit 2.1. Here is how to update it to use Game Porting Toolkit 3.0 (GPTK), released (updated) on 5 December 2025, which emulates NVIDIA DLSS with MetalFX! ...

14 Dec 2025

Running Kokoro TTS via macOS Containerisation Framework

A short 2-in-1 post of two things I’ve been meaning to try out on macOS - first, to try the new macOS Container framework on macOS 15.5… and second, to spin up Kokoro Text-to-Speech (TTS) in a container. ...

17 Aug 2025

Using Flux.1 in GGUF format on macOS

city96 has published GGUF versions of the Flux1.Dev model and T5 XXL text encoder, along with custom nodes to use them in ComfyUI - thought I’d try them on my M2 Mac mini, hoping for faster inference! ...

20 Aug 2024

Fun with Llama 3 (8B) in Ollama

I saw a post on Reddit, entitled “Llama 3 rocks with taking on a personality!”. A fun experiment! I thought to replicate it, blatantly copying the puzzle presented. Llama 3, released by Meta just before the weekend, is impressive. ...

21 Apr 2024

A game with Mistral 7B using Ollama

I keep posting about Stable Diffusion, but I do experiment with Large Language Models too! I do not have much to contribute in this regard, instead, here is the transcript of a game I played with the open source Mistral 7B model via Ollama. ...

20 Mar 2024

Extracting images from PDF files

Happy new year! Ever needed to extract images from PDFs and found both on-line and off-line tools lacking? Well, I certainly have, and here I present my Python code to extract JPGs/PNGs from PDFs, using PyMuPDF. ...

6 Jan 2024

Go even faster with SDXL-Turbo!

In the span of a couple of weeks, we got Crazy fast image generation with LCM LoRA for SDXL, which led me to ask if I could get Faster Stable Diffusion on M-series macs?. A few hours ago, Stability.ai gave us their response in the form of SDXL-Turbo… and now we go even faster! ...

29 Nov 2023