Intro 2.2. Viewing and editing a sound

To see the wave form of a Sound that is in the list of objects, select that Sound and click View & Edit. A SoundEditor window will appear on your screen. You see a waveform (or two waveforms, if you have a stereo sound) and probably some “analyses” below it. You can zoom in and scroll to see the various parts of the sound in detail. You can select a part of the sound by dragging with the mouse. To play a part of the sound, click in any of the rectangles below it. To move a selected part of the sound to another location, use Cut and Paste from the Edit menu. You can open sound windows for more than one sound, and then cut, copy, and paste between the sounds, just as you are used to doing with text and pictures in word processing programs.

If your sound file is longer than a couple of minutes, or if you want to see and listen to both channels of a stereo sound, you may prefer to open it with Open long sound file.... This puts a LongSound object into the list. In this way, most of the sound will stay in the file on disk, and at most 60 seconds will be read into memory each time you play or view a part of it. To change these 60 seconds to something else, e.g. 500 seconds, choose LongSound settings... from the Settings submenu of the Praat menu.

### Links to this page

- Intro
- Intro 2. What to do with a sound