Installation

All releases for the Montreal Forced Aligner are available on Montreal Forced Aligner releases.

Mac

Note

Montreal Forced Aligner currently only works on Mac OS X 10.11

  1. Download the zip archive for Mac and unzip the folder to any directory

  2. Open a terminal window

  3. Navigate to the montreal-forced-aligner folder (cd /path/to/montreal-forced-aligner)

  4. Test the commands bin/mfa_align and bin/mfa_train_and_align (these should print usage messages about the commands)

Windows

Note

Montreal Forced Aligner has only been tested on Windows 10, but should work on Windows 7 and 8

  1. Download the zip archive for Windows and unzip the folder to any directory

  2. Open a command window (open the Start menu and search for cmd)

  3. Navigate to the montreal-forced-aligner folder (cd C:\path\to\montreal-forced-aligner; you can copy its path by holding Shift and right clicking on the folder, then selecting “Copy as path” and pasting it into the command prompt)

  4. Test the commands bin\mfa_align and bin\mfa_train_and_align (these should print usage messages about the commands)

Linux

The Linux distributions were built on Ubuntu 14.04, and so may not work on machines that have older versions of Linux system packages. If these instructions do not work, then the executables will have to be built from source.

  1. Download the tar.gz archive for Linux and untar the folder to any directory

  2. Open a terminal window

  3. Navigate to the montreal-forced-aligner folder (cd /path/to/montreal-forced-aligner)

  4. Test the commands bin/mfa_align and bin/mfa_train_and_align (these should print usage messages about the commands)

Building from source

NB: These instructions require Python 3 (you may have to replace instances of python and pip with python3 and pip3 if Python 3 is not your default Python) and assume Linux in the commands.

  1. Get kaldi compiled and working: Kaldi GitHub repository

  2. Download the source zip from the releases page

  3. Open a terminal and go to the unzipped folder (cd /path/to/Montreal-Forced-Aligner/thirdparty)

  4. Run the thirdparty/kaldibinaries.py script, pointing it to where Kaldi was built (python thirdparty/kaldibinaries.py /path/to/kaldi/root)

  5. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install the requirements for the aligner

  6. Run the build script via freezing/freeze.sh. There will now be a montreal-forced-aligner folder in the dist folder. This folder should contain a bin folder with the two executables mfa_align and mfa_train_and_align that should be used for alignment.

If you would like to use the G2P capabilities, you will also have to build the OpenGrm NGram library and Phonetisaurus and then run the thirdparty/opengrm_ngram_binaries.py and thirdparty/phonetisaurus_binaries.py pointing at the respective root directories.

Files created when using the Montreal Forced Aligner

The aligner will save data and logs for the models it trains in a new folder, Documents/MFA (which it creates in your user’s home directory). If a model for a corpus already exists in MFA, it will use any existing models if you try to align it again. (If this is not desired, delete or move the old model folder.) You can specify your own temporary directory by using the -t flag when calling the executable.