LongSound

One of the types of objects in Praat. See the Sound files tutorial.

A LongSound object gives you the ability to view and label a sound file that resides on disk. You will want to use it for sounds that are too long to read into memory as a Sound object (typically, a few minutes).

## How to create a LongSound object

You create a LongSound object with Open long sound file... from the Open menu.

## What you can do with a LongSound object

You can save a LongSound object to a new sound file, perhaps in a different format (AIFF, AIFC, WAV, NeXT/Sun, NIST, FLAC) with the commands in the Save menu. You can also concatenate several LongSound objects in this way. See How to concatenate sound files.

## How to view and edit a LongSound object

You can view a LongSound object in a LongSoundEditor by choosing LongSound: View. This also allows you to extract parts of the LongSound as Sound objects, or save these parts as a sound file. There are currently no ways to actually change the data in the file.

## How to annotate a LongSound object

You can label and segment a LongSound object after the following steps:

  1. Select the LongSound object.
  2. Choose LongSound: To TextGrid... and specify your tiers.
  3. Select the resulting TextGrid object together with the LongSound object, and click View & Edit.

A TextGridEditor will appear on the screen, with a copy of the LongSound object in it.

## Limitations

The length of the sound file is limited to 2 gigabytes, which is 3 hours of CD-quality stereo, or 12 hours 16-bit mono sampled at 22050 Hz.

### Links to this page

- Get number of samples
- Get sample number from time...
- Get time from sample number...
- Intro 2.2. Viewing and editing a sound
- Intro 3.1. Viewing a spectrogram
- Intro 4.1. Viewing a pitch contour
- Intro 5.1. Viewing formant contours
- Intro 6.1. Viewing an intensity contour
- Intro 7. Annotation
- Save as AIFC file...
- Save as AIFF file...
- Save as FLAC file...
- Save as NeXT/Sun file...
- Save as NIST file...
- Save as WAV file...
- Sound files 3. Files that Praat can read
- SpellingChecker
- What was new in 3.8?