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ebook2cw version: 0.8.5 - - See ChangeLog - Download directory -
Updates (Atom Feed format)
ebook2cwgui version: 0.1.2 - - See ChangeLog-GUI
ebook2cw is a command line program (optional graphical user interface available) which converts a plain text (ASCII, ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8) file (e. g. an ebook) to Morse code MP3 or OGG audio files. It works on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
A number of CW and audio parameters can be changed from their default values, by command line switches or a config file (see below). These are (default values in brackets):
CW prosigns can be generated by enclosing arbitrary letters in angle brackets (e.g. <AR>, <SK>, ...).
The tone frequency (f), speed (w), effective speed (e), volume (v, 1..100), waveform (T) and SNR (N) can be changed arbitrarily within the text by inserting commands, starting with a pipe symbol, followed by the parameter to change and the value.
Silence/pauses can be inserted by |Snnnn.
Example: |f400 changes the tone frequency to 400Hz,
|w60 changes the speed to 60wpm, |S1000 inserts 1000
milliseconds of silence..
ebook2cw has no graphical user interface itself, but a GUI interface is available as a separate program.
These explanations aim at Windows users since I assume that Linux users can adopt it more easily to their needs than the other way around.
To convert the ebook file "Book.txt", in which the chapters are separated by "Chapter n" to MP3 files, called "Book-n.mp3", at 40wpm, the following command has to be entered in the Windows command prompt (Start → Utilities → Command prompt):
In the shadows of the internet, where data flows like water, there exists a persistent legend: the "Highly Compressed" game. It is the digital equivalent of a mirage in a desert—the promise of a triple-A blockbuster, usually weighing in at a hefty 15GB, squeezed effortlessly into a 10MB archive. It sounds like a magic trick, a technological miracle that defies the very laws of computing.
For a game like Hitman: Absolution, this proposition is particularly ironic. The game is a visual feast—a gritty, neo-noir masterpiece of lighting, texture, and crowd AI. It is built on the Glacier 2 engine, designed to render hundreds of NPC characters in distinct detail. To compress Agent 47’s world of assassination down to the size of a few high-resolution JPEGs (a mere 10MB) is like trying to fit an entire symphony orchestra into a matchbox.
Why the "10MB" Myth Endures The allure is undeniable. For gamers with limited bandwidth or those in regions with expensive data plans, a file labeled "Hitman Absolution Highly Compressed 10MB 75 new" feels like a golden ticket. It suggests that someone, somewhere, cracked the code. It implies that game developers are lazy with their file sizes and that a rogue coder has found a way to strip the fat without killing the muscle.
But the reality of data compression is unforgiving. Even the audio files for a single mission in Absolution—the whispers of targets, the ambient chatter of crowds—would easily exceed 10MB. The game’s textures alone are gigabytes of data. If you were to somehow compress the game to that size, what would remain? A wireframe Agent 47 moving through a void of white noise?
The Technical Reality While a legitimate 10MB playable version is a fantasy, what you often find behind these links is a "Russian Doll" deception. You download the 10MB file, expecting an installer. Instead, you find a dummy setup that claims to "unpack" the game. It runs a progress bar for hours, tricking the user into believing it is reconstructing the data. In reality, it is often downloading the rest of the 15GB from a hidden server in the background, or worse, installing malware that turns your PC into a bot for a remote hitman of a different kind.
The Compression That Actually Works If we step away from the fake 10MB scams and look at the genuine engineering marvels of the gaming world, "highly compressed" games do exist, but they typically bottom out around 2GB to 4GB. This is done through "rip" techniques—stripping out multi-language voiceovers, down-sampling 4K textures to 720p, and re-encoding cutscenes. hitman absolution highly compressed 10mb 75 new
The famous "Black Box" or "FitGirl" repacks prove that you can shrink Hitman: Absolution significantly. They can take a 15GB game and slim it down to perhaps 6GB or 7GB. That is impressive. But 10MB? That remains the domain of the earliest 8-bit games and simple flash animations.
The Verdict The search for "Hitman Absolution Highly Compressed 10MB" is a hunt for a ghost. It is a digital folktale. While Agent 47 is the world's greatest assassin, capable of eliminating any target, there is one thing even he cannot kill: the file size of a high-definition video game.
The text serves as a warning and a tribute: respect the gigabytes, or your computer might pay the price.
Hitman: Absolution highly compressed 10MB" is a popular search term, it is important to know that
it is virtually impossible to compress a modern AAA game like Hitman: Absolution down to 10MB The original game requires approximately 24GB of hard drive space In the shadows of the internet, where data
. Compressing 24GB into 10MB would require a compression ratio of 2400:1, which far exceeds the capabilities of any standard compression technology. The Risks of "10MB" Highly Compressed Files
If you encounter a site offering Hitman: Absolution in a 10MB or 20MB package, be extremely cautious for the following reasons: Malware & Viruses: These tiny files often act as "droppers" or installers for trojans and other malicious software that can harm your computer. Fake Downloads:
Many of these links lead to endless survey loops or fake password-protected files designed to generate advertising revenue for the uploader. Ripped Content:
Even if a compressed version works, "highly compressed" usually means "highly ripped"—meaning all cutscenes, audio, and high-quality textures
have been deleted to save space, leaving the game unplayable or unsatisfying. Real Game Size & Requirements Search for verified repackers (GOG Unlocked, FitGirl, Dodi
To play Hitman: Absolution as intended, you should prepare for the following actual sizes: PC Install Size: Steam Download Size: 11GB to 16GB
due to standard data compression used by official platforms. Android/Mobile Version: 12GB to 24GB of free space to install properly. Official Sources
For a safe and complete experience, it is recommended to get the game through legitimate retailers: Hitman: Absolution™ on Steam
Search for verified repackers (GOG Unlocked, FitGirl, Dodi Repacks). Remember: 8GB is the floor. You will need 16GB of RAM to unpack it. Do not trust anything claiming to be under 4GB.
VirusTotal scans of such files typically reveal 30–45 detections: Trojans (Agent, Kryptik), worms, keyloggers, and backdoors. Once executed, the malware can:
Unlike the mythical 10MB repack, legitimate game compression is a legitimate science. Here’s how it’s done:
A good repack of Hitman Absolution from a trusted source will weigh in at 6–9 GB, install in 20–40 minutes (depending on CPU), and run the full game. No 10MB version exists—and none ever will.
In this example everything takes place in C:\test\. It is assumed that ebook2cw.exe and the text file to convert are in this directory.
If you want to avoid using the command line, a simple batch file for Windows is available. If placed in the same directory, you can comfortably drag & drop a text file to ebook2cw. The new GUI offers an even more comfortable way to convert ebooks.
As of version 0.7.0 (July 2008), ebook2cw can read a configuration file,
ebook2cw.conf. In this file you can set all of the parameters which
are available as command line parameters, to reduce typing work each time you
use ebook2cw.
An example ebook2cw.conf with
further explanations is available. Under Windows, place this file in the same
directory as ebook2cw. Under Linux, it is also searched for in ~/.ebook2cw/.
As of version 0.6.0 (February 2008), ebook2cw supports the full ISO 8859-1 charset (where mappings to CW symbols are applicable) and also UTF-8 (1- and 2-byte sequences). The latter so far includes most of the Latin characters, the Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. To maintain backward compability, the default character set is ISO 8859-1. Use the -u command line switch to enable UTF-8.
The available codes can be printed by ebook2cw with the -S command line option (see above), here is the output: UTF-8 - ISO 8859-1. I am grateful for any feedback and additions to the tables.
As of version 0.7.0 (July 2008), character mappings can be defined. For example, you can automatically replace all accented characters or umlauts (e.g. á = .--.-, ä = .-.-) with more common characters (like a = .-).
This is done by map files separately for ISO8859-1 and UTF-8 coded
texts. These map files must be specified in ebook2cw.conf, examples
are available for ISO8859-1 and
UTF-8. Under Windows, place them in the
same directory as ebook2cw. Under Linux, these files are also searched for in
~/.ebook2cw/.
Note that native character mapping is only implemented for 1- and 2-byte sequences of UTF-8 characters at the moment. If you need to map other characters, you may use this shell script by Tor, NH7XC which does the job with sed, or the cwzer.py Python script by Gabe/IZ4APU.
A graphical user interface (GUI) for ebook2cw is available as a separate program (screenshots: WinXP, Linux). It is designed to work on Windows (95 through 7), Linux and Mac OS X (not tested). It's a single executable file that you can download here (Windows version - see the download directory for the source code to compile it for other platforms).
ebook2cw.exe itself is not included within the GUI; it must be downloaded separately and saved in
the same directory, or anywhere within the executable path.
The GUI uses the same configuration file as ebook2cw, called ebook2cw.conf.
The default settings (except for the speed) are probably suitable for most people. A full hour of MP3 takes only 7 MB, OGG even less, so depending on your speed, several books will fit even on cheap 1 GB portable media players.
Some MP3 players do not support all the possible variations of samplerates and bitrates.
If you are running into problems with the default configuration, please try the command line options
-s22050 -b32 (or make these settings in the GUI) to produce your MP3 files.
The speed of the conversion mainly depends on your CPU speed; for example converting The War of the Worlds to MP3 at 60 WpM, resulting in almost 17 hours of MP3 took about 15 minutes on the author's dated 1.8 GHz Celeron CPU. The OGG encoder is a little slower.
Books are subject to different copyright laws in every country; there are several online archives with free (copyright expired or public domain in the respective country) ebooks, most notably Project Gutenberg.
Here is a list of books that the author already completed reading in CW.
User feedback indicates, that ebook2cw is also used to prepare Morse courses lessons, generate morse versions of DX newsletters and other purposes (e. g. a CW plugin for the IRC client colloquy., a Telegram bot which converts text messages to CW and a Morse RSS reader).
The author claims no credit for the original idea to convert books to morse. Other hams (like DL2KCD, K7QO, AC4FS, KY8D) have done this before but the distribution as audio files largely limits the flexibility and requires a lot of bandwidth. Therefore, after some discussions on the AGCW mailinglist in October/November the author decided to write a free piece of software with which everyone can create a CW audio book to his or her own liking.
ebook2cw can be compiled to run on a webserver as a CGI (make cgi or make cgibuffered).
It then returns a MP3 or OGG file when called with a suitable set of parameters,
allowing for integrating dynamically created Morse code into websites.
Example:
http://example.com/cgi-bin/cw.cgi?s=25&e=20&f=600&t=%20hello%20world
returns a sound file with "hello world" at 25wpm character speed, 20wpm
effective speed at a tone frequency of 600 Hz. Add d=123 as the
first GET parameter to get the file as a download with filename "lcwo-123.mp3". These are all available HTTP GET parameters but using the text commands, more options are available.
This is extensively used on Learn CW Online (lcwo.net) (but nowadays the main method of generating CW on the website is by using jscwlib). Over there you'll also find an online text to CW converter.
Of course ebook2cw is free software (free as in beer and free as in freedom) and published under the GPLv2.
The current versions are: ebook2cw 0.8.5 (Aug 16, 2023), ebook2cwgui 0.1.2 (January 23rd 2013). They can be obtained in several formats:
| Official files | ||
|---|---|---|
| Format | Link | Remarks |
| Windows EXE | ebook2cw.exe | OGG/MP3 support (510 KB) |
| Windows EXE | ebook2cw-mp3.exe | MP3 only (186 KB) |
| Windows EXE | ebook2cw-ogg.exe | OGG only (375 KB) |
| Windows EXE | ebook2cwgui.exe | (GUI only. Requires ebook2cw.exe) |
| Linux Binary | ebook2cw | static, use if you can't compile it yourself |
| Source Code | ebook2cw-0.8.5.tar.gz | |
| Source Code | ebook2cwgui-0.1.2.tar.gz | |
| Packages for various systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OS X) | ||
| OS | Link | Maintainer |
| Debian | ebook2cw-0.8.5-1 ebook2cwgui_0.1.2-1 | Christoph, DK5CF |
| Ubuntu | ppa:kamalmostafa/ebook2cw | Kamal, KA6MAL (incl. GUI, based on Debian package) |
| FreeBSD port | ebook2cw | Diane, VA3DB (db) |
| FreeBSD port | ebook2cwgui | Diane, VA3DB / Chris Petrik (cpet) |
| ArchLinux | ebook2cw | Mike, WB2FKO (sportscliche) |
| Mac OS X | build instructions | provided by Alan, N3IMU |
Many thanks to all the maintainers for their time and efforts to make ebook2cw available on so many platforms!
Previous versions can be found in the download directory; the source code repository is at https://git.fkurz.net/dj1yfk/ebook2cw.
ebook2cw was written by Fabian Kurz, DJ5CW (ex DJ1YFK).
I am always interested in any kind of feedback for my software. If you have any suggestions, questions, feature-requests etc., don't hesitate a minute and contact me via .