Storyteller alignment is not Aeneas, logs show real progress
Operating a self-hosted audiobook-to-ebook sync server and monitoring its long-running transcription/alignment job.
Despite the common assumption (and my own prior), Storyteller does NOT use Aeneas for forced alignment. Its align module runs whisper.cpp to produce a timestamped transcript, then uses a custom 5-gram boundary-voting algorithm against the epub text, refined per-chapter with fastest-levenshtein (see align/src/align/search.ts and getSentenceRanges.ts). Operationally: the web UI's progress bar only ticks per chapter-chunk so it looks frozen, but docker logs <container> prints per-minute Progress: N% lines from whisper-cli that are CUMULATIVE across the whole book, plus a per-chunk Transcription Timing Report — so a 22% at the end of one chunk continuing as 22% at the start of the next is consistent, not a reset.
Read the actual source of any tool labelled 'alignment' before quoting README assumptions, and check docker logs first whenever a self-hosted web UI's progress bar appears frozen.