Prepare .wav files

Different aligners may have different requirements for audio input. Most work well with 16 KHz, 16-bit precision, and mono channel, so it would be safe to format all the target .wav files like that.

1.1 Praat

You can reformat your .wav files in Praat using its interactive graphical interface. To acquire a single channel, select the sound > Convert > Convert to mono or Extract one channel; to change the sampling rate, select the sound > Convert > Resample; then save it as a new .wav. The default is 16-bit in Praat.

1.2 SoX

Alternatively, you can also use SoX (Sound eXchange) commands in the Terminal. SoX is a collection of handy sound processing utilities. It is also required by P2FA. You can download it here. To reformat the input.wav, we can use the following command in the Terminal having installed SoX.

$ sox input.wav -r 16k -b 16 -c 1 output.wav

The $ isn’t part of the command. It indicates that this is a Shell script in the Terminal. The flags here: -r , -b, -c define the sampling rate, precision, and number of channel of the output.wav respectively.