About Lorecast

Lorecast is a free library of classic novels recorded with a full cast: every named character speaks in their own voice, and the narrator has a voice of their own. It exists because the books most worth hearing that way — detective stories, ensemble adventures, comedies built on two people talking past each other — are almost always read by one person doing all the parts.

Who builds it

It is built and run by one developer, Carl Eriksson Skogh. That covers the text pipeline that parses a novel and attributes its dialogue, the voice casting for all 31 books, the audio assembly and levelling, the API, and this website. There is no studio, no team and no outside funding.

What it is not

• These are generated voices, not actors. They are good enough that you stop noticing on a good line, and not good enough to beat a gifted human reader performing a book they love.
• The catalogue is 31 books, not thousands. Every one was chosen for how much dialogue it carries, because that is where a full cast earns its keep.
• Occasional artefacts survive review — a clipped word, a breath in an odd place. Report one and it gets fixed in the next pass over that book.

Why it is free

It is free because the texts are public domain and the production cost is compute rather than studio time. There is no advertising, no tracker and nothing sold on: the running cost is a single small server and a storage bill.

The catalogue, in numbers

31 books, 558 chapters, 159 hours of audio and 304 separate character voices. Every text is public domain, sourced from Standard Ebooks where an edition exists there and Project Gutenberg otherwise.