Data preparation

Prior to running the aligner, make sure the following are set up:

  1. A pronunciation dictionary for your language should specify the pronunciations of orthographic transcriptions.
  2. The sound files to align.
  3. Orthographic annotations in .lab files for individual sound files (Prosodylab-aligner format) or in TextGrid intervals for longer sound files (TextGrid format).

The sound files and the orthographic annotations should be contained in one directory structured as follows:

+-- corpus_directory
|       --- recording1.wav
|       --- recording1.TextGrid
|       --- recording2.wav
|       --- recording2.TextGrid
|       --- ...

Note

A collection of preprocessing scripts to get various corpora of other formats is available in the MFA-reorganization-scripts repository.

For details on how to organize each of these three components, see below.