Dear Praat users,
you can now download Praat version 4.6 from www.praat.org.
The main improvement since version 4.5 is in the quality of sound. With Read from file... you can now as easily open stereo as mono files; the Sound window will show both channels, and both channels will play. Stereo files also work for listening experiments.
This also improves the analysis of sound: spectrograms now show the average of the energies of the two channels (not the energy of the mono sounds, i.e. the averaged channels), pitch analysis is based on correlations in both channels, and intensity analysis averages the energies of the two channels (formant analysis is still based on the mono sound, until we know how to make this stereo-savvy).
For mono sounds, there is no change at all, but stereo sounds are now handled as they should. Several commands have been added for converting between mono and stereo, and several other commands have an extra setting (script writers do not have to worry: the old versions will still work).
Another improvement of sound quality is that Praat now uses CoreAudio on the Macintosh (allowing up to 96 kHz as a sampling frequency, and solving Audacity’s compatibility problem), and that playing sounds now uses much less CPU time on Windows than before (causing your laptop fan to stay silent).
Other changes:
Phonetic analysis: improved Sound: Change gender....
File types: Praat now opens FLAC audio files (thanks to Erez Volk) and 32-bit floating-point WAV files.
Platforms: there will be no new versions for Windows 95/98/ME after today’s 4.6. And Praat now works around a bug in Windows XP that could cause Praat (and NotePad) to crash when trying to open or save a file (see the download page).
Statistics: several more commands to handle Tables.
Optimality Theoretic learning: support for MaxEnt grammars, and a provably convergent HarmonicGrammar learning algorithm.
Scripting: you can use scripts in ManPages to draw pictures; you can assign commands to object IDs as in pitch = To Pitch....
Graphics: arrowhead sizes can be changed.
For version 4.7 you can expect more Unicode support and more documented statistical tests.
best wishes,
Paul