Frequently asked questions

What is Lorecast?

Lorecast is a free audiobook library where every character speaks in their own voice. Instead of one narrator reading all the parts, each named character is cast separately, so a conversation between three people sounds like three people. There are 31 classic novels and stories, 558 chapters, about 159 hours of audio.

Is Lorecast really free?

Yes. The whole catalogue is free with no card, no trial that expires and no adverts. Chapter one of every book plays without an account at all; a free account unlocks the rest and remembers where you stopped. There is no paid tier to upgrade to today.

How is this different from a normal audiobook?

A traditional audiobook has one narrator performing every role. Lorecast casts the narrator and each speaking character as separate voices, then assembles the chapter from those performances. For dialogue-heavy fiction the effect is closer to a radio drama than a reading — you can tell who is talking without being told.

Are these real voice actors?

No. Every voice is generated by AI, and no recording of a named actor is imitated. The voices are built from short reference clips in three public, consented speech corpora: CMU ARCTIC (Carnegie Mellon, BSD), the VCTK Corpus (University of Edinburgh, CC-BY 4.0) and Mozilla Common Voice (CC0).

How does Lorecast know which character is speaking?

Each chapter is read by a language model whose only job is attribution: paragraph by paragraph, it decides whether a line is narration or a specific character speaking, and in what tone. That transcript drives the casting, so the right voice performs the right line without anyone marking up the text by hand.

Which books are on Lorecast?

Public-domain classics chosen for how much dialogue they carry: the Sherlock Holmes stories and The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dracula, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, Alice in Wonderland, The War of the Worlds, Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn and more.

Is this legal?

Yes. Every text is in the public domain, sourced from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg, so no licence is needed to record it. The voices are generated from openly licensed speech corpora rather than cloned from copyrighted performances, and the cover art comes from public-domain editions.

Can I download the audio?

Not from the site — Lorecast streams. Playback remembers your position per chapter, so you can close the tab and pick the book up later on any device you are signed in on.

Does Lorecast work on a phone?

Yes. The site is built mobile-first and works in any modern phone browser, with the player controls in reach of a thumb. There is no app to install.

Does Lorecast track me?

No. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no session recording and no third-party tracker of any kind, which is why there is no cookie banner — there is nothing optional to consent to. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Who makes Lorecast?

Lorecast is built and run by one developer, Carl Eriksson Skogh, from the text-parsing pipeline through the voice casting to the site you are reading. Nothing is outsourced, and there is no recording studio anywhere in it.