What was new in 3.9?

## Praat 3.9, 18 October 2000

Editors:

  • Shift-click and shift-drag extend or shrink selection in editor windows.
  • Grouped editors can have separate zooming and scrolling (FunctionEditor preferences).
  • Cursor follows playing sound in editors; interruption by Escape key moves the cursor.
  • TextGridEditor: optimized for transcribing large corpora: text field, directly movable boundaries, more visible text in tiers, SpellingChecker, type while the sound is playing, complete keyboard navigation, control font size, control text alignment, shift-click near boundary adds interval to selection.
  • Stereo display in LongSound and TextGrid editors.
  • LongSoundEditor and TextGridEditor: write selection to audio file.
  • SoundEditor: added command Extract selection (preserve times).
  • IntervalTierEditor, DurationTierEditor.
  • Added many query commands in editors.

Phonetics library:

  • Sound: To Formant...: sample-rate-independent formant analysis.
  • Sound: To Harmonicity... (glottal-to-noise excitation ratio).
  • Pitch: support for ERB units, draw all combinations of line/speckle and linear/logarithmic/semitones/mels/erbs, optionally with TextGrid, Subtract linear fit.
  • Spectrum: Draw along logarithmic frequency axis.
  • TextGrid: modification commands, Extract part, Shift to zero, Scale times (with Sound or LongSound).
  • Matrix: To TableOfReal, Matrix: Draw contour....
  • Concatenate Sound and LongSound objects.
  • File formats: save PitchTier in spreadsheet format, read CGN syntax files (XML version), text files now completely file-server-safe (independent from Windows/Macintosh/Unix line separators).

Statistics and numerics library:

  • Principal component analysis.
  • Discriminant analysis.
  • Polynomial: drawing, root finding etc.
  • TableOfReal: Draw box plots....
  • Covariance: To TableOfReal (random sampling)....
  • SSCP: Get sigma ellipse area....
  • Query DTW for “weighted distance” of time warp.
  • Distributions: To Strings (exact)...
  • Strings: Randomize

Phonology library:

  • OTGrammar: To PairDistribution.

Graphics:

  • Full support for colour inkjet printers on Windows and Macintosh.
  • Full support for high-resolution colour clipboards and metafiles for Windows and Macintosh programs that support them (this include MS Word for Windows, but unfortunately not MS Word for Macintosh).
  • Colour in EPS files.
  • Interpolating grey images, i.e. better zoomed spectrograms.
  • Linux: support for 24-bits screens.

Audio:

  • Asynchronous sound play.
  • Linux: solved problems with /dev/mixer (“Cannot read MIC gain.”) on many computers.
  • Added possibility of zero padding for sound playing, in order to reduce clicks on some Linux and Sun computers.
  • LongSound supports mono and stereo, 8-bit and 16-bit, μ-law and A-law, big-endian and little-endian, AIFC, WAV, NeXT/Sun, and NIST files. •vRead two Sounds from stereo file... supports 8-bit and 16-bit, μ-law and A-law, big-endian and little-endian, AIFC, WAV, NeXT/Sun, and NIST files.
  • SoundRecorder writes to 16-bit AIFC, WAV, NeXT/Sun, and NIST mono and stereo files.
  • Sound & LongSound: write part or whole to mono or stereo audio file.
  • Read Sound from raw Alaw file.
  • Artword & Speaker (& Sound) movie: real time on all platforms.

Scripting:

  • Formulas 5. Mathematical functions: added statistical functions: χ2, Student T, Fisher F, binomial, and their inverse functions.
  • Windows: program `praatcon` for use as a Unix-style console application.
  • Windows and Unix: Praat can be run with a command-line interface without quitting on errors.
  • Unix & Windows: can use <stdout> as a file name (supports pipes for binary data).
  • sendpraat now also for Macintosh.
  • sendsocket.
  • Read from file... recognizes script files if they begin with “`#!`”.
  • Script links in ManPages.

Documentation

  • Tutorials on all subjects available through Intro.

### Links to this page

- What's new?