PDF to MP3 - Convert PDF, EPUB, DOCX & Text to Audiobook
Pricing
from $40.00 / 1,000 audio minute generateds
Turn PDF, EPUB, DOCX, Markdown, HTML, TXT or RTF into an MP3 audiobook. Free Edge neural TTS needs no API key, OCR recovers scanned pages, 70+ languages are auto-detected, and OpenAI or ElevenLabs voices work with your own key. Long books split into chapter-sized parts.
All notable changes to this Actor will be documented in this file.
PRICING.md documents the measured model and the
margin table behind the new numbers.maxMemoryMbytes lowered from 8192 to 4096. The pipeline runs at 21% CPU, so
more memory buys nothing, and the Apify MCP server rejects Actors that ask for
more than 4 GB.maxCostUsd no longer delivers a whole audiobook for the capped price. It
used to clamp the charge while still narrating everything, so a caller could
set the floor value on a 500-page book and receive ~18 hours of audio for
$0.12 against $0.28 of platform cost. Narration now stops at the last chunk
the budget covers and the run returns the new status: "capped" with the
audio produced so far.Actor.charge returns
eventChargeLimitReached and chargedCount; both were discarded, so a run
started with a low platform limit kept synthesizing audio nobody could be
billed for. Both are now read, and either ceiling stops narration.cost field now scales with allocated memory,
matching how the platform actually charges it (one event per GB).documentUrl gained a default, so a call with no arguments produces audio
rather than an input error. This also gives Apify's daily health check, which
runs with empty input, real work to verify.status and a plain-language statusMessage, and
carries audioUrls, durationHuman, sizeBytes, audioFormat, title and
language. parts and failedChunkIndexes are capped so a long book cannot
bloat a tool response. Every audio link is a direct, publicly fetchable MP3
URL, so an agent never pulls a binary through the tool result.overview dataset view and a field-level dataset schema; the output
schema now points at both views.https://mcp.apify.com?tools=...), a
Claude Desktop and Claude Code configuration, an example tool call and the
direct API route.status: "failed" dataset row and exits 0. Only an unclassified error exits
non-zero. Crashing on these hid the explanation from the user and reported the
Actor as broken to Apify's daily health check, which runs empty input.documentUrl carries a demo
prefill, so uploading a file used to fail validation through no fault of the
user. Sources are ranked instead — upload, pasted text, base64, URL — and the
chosen one is logged.pdftoppm) and OCR'd (Tesseract: EN, ES, FR, DE, IT,
PT, NL) and narrated. New ocr-page-processed billing event ($0.10/page),
charged only for pages that actually need OCR. Toggle with enableOcr.pdfPassword.proxyConfiguration for the Document URL fetch.pdf-parse (2018 PDF.js, unmaintained) with unpdf — current,
serverless-friendly PDF.js. Per-page extraction via a direct array index
(no render-hook page-order invariant to desync)..dockerignore so .env / secrets / local state never enter image layers.pdf-page-narrated; narration is now billed
purely per audio-minute-generated ($0.04/min) so the same value isn't
double-billed on two axes.apify-actor-start raised to $0.12 (from the $0.00005 platform default):
it's the only revenue on a failed / 0-page run, so it's sized to stay
margin-positive on failures after Apify's 20% cut while remaining trivial
against value events on real documents (and absorbed by free trials).ocr-page-processed stays $0.10. Net effect: ~90%+ margin on every real run,
no loss on failed runs.maxCostUsd now also clamps the actual audio-minute charge (not just the
pre-flight estimate), so slow-speech / CJK runs can't bill past the cap.maxCostUsd floor is now $0.12 (the unavoidable actor-start fee); sub-floor /
zero values are rejected instead of silently disabling the cap.Multi-format document narration: PDF, Markdown, plain text, and HTML in, MP3 out.
.pdf) — native text-layer extraction (no OCR).docx) — Word documents via mammoth: styles, lists, tables, footnotes.epub) — ebooks via epub2: spine-ordered chapter walk, HTML stripped per chapter.md, .markdown, .mdx) — syntax stripped before TTS so the voice reads natural prose.txt, .text) — UTF-8 with BOM handling.html, .htm, .xhtml) — tags stripped, entities decoded.rtf) — control codes stripped, unicode + hex escapes decodedtext input field) for blog drafts, ChatGPT replies, READMEsgpt-4o-mini-tts (steerable), tts-1, tts-1-hdflash-v2_5, turbo-v2_5maxPartMb)INDEX.html page with inline players + download links for every partPREVIEW key written before TTS starts with pages-to-process + estimated costOUTPUT JSON record with indexUrl, audioUrl, parts[], durations, voice, model, cost, statusmaxCostUsd hard cap aborts cleanly before any TTS if pre-flight estimate exceeds it