Importing Assimil into LingQ

From a comment on YouTube:

Pro tip: re: Importing Assimil into LingQ. Not sure about some of the older versions of assimil, but the newer ones have subtitles on the audio content. You can take a program mp3tag and export the subtitles which effectively is the transcript. You can import that into LingQ along with the audio file (unshared of course). It takes a bit of time and maybe a little editing depending on how nice you want it to look, but it works quite well. I’ve done it for German and Spanish.

I have not done this myself - give it a try and let us know if it works for you!

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Hi Eric. That was me =)
I can give a little additional instruction here. So far I’ve only done this with German and Spanish. The German was the “Superpack” with 4 cd’s. If I remember correctly one of the cd’s has all the mp3’s. That’s the one you want. For Spanish, I also got a new version of the superpack. This one has a usb thumb drive with all the mp3’s. If you play the mp3’s on your computer you may notice that it has the “lyrics” of the lesson you’re listening to. It has the main story and the initial exercise (not the fill in the blank). You can extract these lyrics with a program like mp3tag. The following are the instructions as I remember for mp3tag.

  1. Copy the mp3’s to your computer (this might not be necessary).
  2. Open mp3 tag and go to the directory where the mp3’s are
  3. Highlight all of the lessons
  4. Right click and click “export”. This should show a popup with “export configuration”.
  5. If I remember “lyrics” are not part of the main list of items. You may have to click on the “add” button if it’s not there. If you needed to add it then the “code” should be (i’m on version v2.90a):

$filename(txt,utf-8)$loop(%_path%)%artist% - %album% - %title% - %track% - %unsyncedlyrics%
$loopend()

  1. Once you’ve done that you can click “OK”. I noticed that there is a checkbox “One file per directory”. This is ticked and all the “lyrics” go into one file. Nicely formatted. I’m not sure if unclicking it will create one per lesson.

  2. File is created in the same directory.

The file will have all the lessons and it will some extra “stuff” you may want to edit out. I created a lesson for each, importing them individually and uploading the audio for each. It’s possible you can refine the “code” above to eliminate the extra info you don’t really need (artist, album, etc).

Hopefully that helps if anyone wants to try. Older versions of Assimil might not have the mp3’s or “lyrics”, but I’m pretty sure any version that mentions mp3 should work for this.

Note…there may be a better program to do this. I did this a couple years ago so not sure if there’s a better way.

Another note…leave the lessons as private. As much as it would be great to share, I’m quite certain that would violate copyright laws.

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