Dear Praat users,
you can now download Praat 5.4 from www.praat.org.
We now have 64-bit editions for all operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux), so that it becomes very unlikely that you will see “not enough memory” messages in the future (unless perhaps if you are working with EEG). Version 5.4 is still available in 32-bit editions, for those of you that do not yet have a 64-bit operating system.
Praat now has support for modern types of control, besides clicking, dragging and typing: the Sound window can be scrolled by swiping across the trackpad of your laptop, and the manual can be scrolled by the scroll wheel of your mouse or by swiping. On the Mac, you can zoom in and out by pinching.
Graphics capabilities have been modernized. Now that EPS files are becoming obsolete, you will be interested to hear that Praat can now save the Picture window as a PDF file on the Mac and Linux. On all platforms, you can now save the Picture window as a 300-dpi or 600-dpi PNG file as well.
Praat can read several more file types than before. This includes some newer types of sound files, but also graphics files such as PNG and JPEG. The graphics files open as a Photo object, which you can then draw to the Picture window or to the Demo window. You can also create a Photo object from a formula and draw it or save it to PNG or JPEG. A Photo object is basically the same as a Matrix object, except that it has three colours instead of just one.
Praat can now work better with sounds with any number of channels, not just mono and stereo.
You can do a lot more now with EEG and ERP.
The scripting language has been simplified in such a way that “variable substitutionÆ is no longer necessary. Instead of, for instance,
Read from file... 'fileName$'
you can now just do
Read from file: fileName$
and instead of
echo Hello, I'm Paul and I'm 'age' years old.
you can now do
writeInfoLine: "Hello, I'm Paul and I'm ", age, " years old."
This change makes the scripting language less of a hybrid between a command shell language (such as bash or tcsh) and a more straightforward programming language such as Python or C (well, the newest language in the world is Apple's Swift, and it does have substitution again...). And, as you can expect from us, older scripts will continue to run.
Apart from these larger improvements, there are many minor improvements and corrections, and, finally, Praat already runs correctly on next week's operating system from Apple.
Best wishes,
Paul