Getting started

Castwright is a desktop application that turns a book into a full-cast audiobook — every character in their own voice, performed on your own hardware. Nothing leaves your machine unless you ask it to.

The whole journey is six steps. The same walkthrough lives inside the app under Help — the ”?” in the top bar — so you can keep it open while you work.

The six steps

1. Add a book. Click “New book” in the library and drop in a manuscript — plain text, EPUB or PDF. Castwright finds the chapters on its own; if a boundary lands wrong, untick the front matter on the next screen, and merge or split chapters later from the book’s Chapters view. For a first run with nothing at stake, open the bundled demo book — a short original story with its cast already designed.

2. Let it read. The analyzer reads every chapter, finds the characters, and works out who speaks each line. It runs on your own machine (with a free cloud fallback) and takes a few minutes — sometimes longer for a big book on a local model. Feel free to wander off; it keeps going without you.

3. Meet the cast. Before anything renders, you meet the cast Castwright found — names, roles, how often each one speaks. Merge any duplicates, and link characters you already know from earlier books in the series: a linked character keeps the voice they had in book one.

4. Give everyone a voice. Every character gets their own voice. Pick one from the Kokoro catalogue, or describe the voice you hear in your head and let Castwright design it with the Qwen3-TTS engine. “Design full cast” does the whole roster in one pass. The Engines & models page covers which engine does what.

5. Generate. Generate renders every chapter with your cast — every line in the right voice, assembled and loudness-normalised per chapter. A chapter that fails tells you why and offers a retry; the failure names on the Troubleshooting page explain what each reason means.

6. Listen — and take it anywhere. Play chapters right in the app, or export the finished audiobook from the Listen view — an M4B with chapter marks, or per-chapter MP3s — and drop it into any player you already use. Nothing locks you in. Where to listen walks through the players we test against.

Where to go next

• Install — system requirements and first-run setup.
• Engines & models — which synthesis engine to use and when.
• Where to listen — exporting your book and the players that handle it well.
• Troubleshooting — if something does not work as expected.