org.praat.Praat.metainfo.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 LinuxSBC <anna@simmons.ovh>
SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
-->
<component type="desktop-application">
  <id>org.praat.Praat</id>
  
  <name>Praat</name>
  <summary>Analyze, synthesize, and manipulate speech</summary>
  
  <metadata_license>MIT</metadata_license>
  <project_license>GPL-3.0-or-later</project_license>
  
  <description>
    <p>
      Welcome to Praat! Praat is a speech analysis tool used for doing phonetics by computer. Praat can analyse, synthesize, and manipulate speech, and create high-quality pictures for your publications. Praat was created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the Institute of Phonetics Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.
    </p>
    <p>
      Some of Praat’s most prominent features are:
    </p>
    <p>
      <em>Speech analysis</em>
    </p>
    <p>
      Praat allows you to analyze different aspects of speech including pitch, formant, intensity, and voice quality. You have access to spectrograms (a visual representation of sound changing over time) and cochleagrams (a specific type of spectrogram more closely resembling how the inner ear receives sound).
    </p>
    <p>
      <em>Speech synthesis</em>
    </p>
    <p>
      Praat allows you to generate speech from a pitch curve and filters that you create (acoustic synthesis), or from muscle activities (articulatory synthesis).
    </p>
    <p>
      <em>Speech manipulation</em>
    </p>
    <p>
      Praat gives you the ability to modify existing speech utterances. You can alter pitch, intensity, and duration of speech.
    </p>
    <p>
      <em>Speech labelling</em>
    </p>
    <p>
      Praat allows you to custom-label your samples using the IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet), and annotate your sound segments based on the particular variables you are seeking to analyze. Multi-language text-to-speech facilities allow you to segment the sound into words and phonemes.
    </p>
    <p>
      <em>Grammar models</em>
    </p>
    <p>
      With Praat, you can try out Optimality-Theoretic and Harmonic-Grammar learning, as well as several kinds of neural-network models.
    </p>
    <p>
      <em>Statistical analysis</em>
    </p>
    <p>
      Praat allows you to perform several statistical techniques, among which multidimensional scaling, principal component analysis, and discriminant analysis.
    </p>
    <p>
      For more information, consult the extensive manual in Praat (under Help), and the website, which has Praat tutorials in several languages.
    </p>
  </description>

  <url type="homepage">https://praat.org</url>
  <url type="bugtracker">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/issues</url>
  <url type="help">https://praat.org/manual/Intro.html</url>
  <url type="vcs-browser">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io</url>

  <developer id="nl.uva">
    <name>University of Amsterdam</name>
  </developer>

  <content_rating type="oars-1.1" />

  <releases>
    <release version="6.6.30" date="2026-06-30">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.6.30</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Tutorial documentation on speech recognition.</li>
          <li>Removed a crashing bug when cross-correlating or convolving two MFCC objects.</li>
          <li>A bit of spectrogram colouring.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.67" date="2026-05-21">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.67</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Include Anastasia Shchupak as Praat’s third author.</li>
          <li>Made the Voice Report give “undefined” H1-minus-H2 values (instead of an error message) if there are zero pulses.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.66" date="2026-05-18">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.66</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Much faster automatic transcription on Windows and Linux.</li>
          <li>Standalone diarization.</li>
          <li>Corrected a crash in sorting an Eigen object (could affect discriminant analysis).</li>
          <li>Removed a bug introduced in 6.4.52 by which running a log script in the Sound window would stop any pending pause window.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.65" date="2026-04-24">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.65</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Fixed a bug that could lead to a “Text is not valid UTF-8” error message in automatic transcription.</li>
          <li>More windows recognize Command-Q (**Quit Praat**).</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.64" date="2026-04-17">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.64</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Many small improvements and bug repairs in speech recognition, including automatic alignment and diarization.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.63" date="2026-04-04">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.63</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Speaker diarization in **Transcribe interval** (if Whisper models installed).</li>
          <li>Mac: Command-mousewheel zooming (as on Windows).</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.62" date="2026-03-13">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.62</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Sound: To TextGrid (speech activity, Silero)...: “voice activity detection” by AI.</li>
          <li>TextGrid window: fixed a bug from 2013 or earlier that could cause Praat to crash during interval alignment.</li>
          <li>Fixed a bug that caused Praat to crash if a notebook was run twice.</li>
          <li>Linux: support horizontal scrolling in three ways (two-finger swiping on the touchpad; left and right tilting of the mouse’s scroll wheel; turning the mouse’s scroll wheel while keeping the Shift key pressed).</li>
          <li>Linux: support zooming by turning the mouse’s scroll wheel while keeping the Ctrl key pressed).</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.61" date="2026-02-28">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.61</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>**Transcribe interval** (via automatic speech recognition): better word alignment via Whisper’s built-in DTW.</li>
          <li>**Transcribe interval** (via automatic speech recognition): option for silence removal (via an additionally installed AI model).</li>
          <li>Windows: Ctrl+Alt+Letter menu shortcuts have become Ctrl+Shift+Letter, because that’s the way it’s nowadays done in e.g. browsers and NotePad, and because Ctrl+Alt+Letter combinations can stand for actual Alt-GR characters on some keyboards. On the Mac we still use Option+Command+Letter. Note that on most Windows keyboards the Ctrl and Alt keys are adjacent, as as the Option and Command keys on most Mac keyboards.</li>
          <li>Manual: menu shortcuts for **Previous page** and **Next page**.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.60" date="2026-02-10">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.60</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Scripting: fixed an interaction between pause windows and exitScript.</li>
          <li>Scripting: turned cases of multiple identical procedure names into once-warnings instead of errors.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.59" date="2026-02-05">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.59</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Made nested scripts with pause windows and/or Demo window work again.</li>
          <li>Fixed a bug by which SpeechRecognizer creation could make Praat crash on some platforms.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.58" date="2026-01-25">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.58</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>MacOS Tahoe: support making menu choices or turning windows to full screen if a script is paused (by the Demo window or the Pause window), as on earlier MacOS versions and on Windows and Linux.</li>
          <li>Windows: support horizontal scrolling in three ways (two-finger swiping on the touchpad; left and right tilting of the mouse’s scroll wheel; turning the mouse’s scroll wheel while keeping the Shift key pressed).</li>
          <li>Windows: better dotted or dashed thick lines. </li>
          <li>Sound: To PowerCepstrogram... now averages the power over channels instead of taking only channel 1.</li>
          <li>Opening TIFF files with Read from file..., as well as Insert picture from file...: rid a bug that would show monochrome TIFF files in four vertical stripes.</li>
          <li>Mac and Linux: made Insert picture from file... work for PDF files again (bug since 6.4.28).</li>
          <li>Backslash trigraph for apico-postalveolars: ṣ (s\.v), following Ladefoged &amp; Maddieson (1996), who wanted to distinguish them from the more extreme retroflexes, i.e. apico-palatals such as ʂ (\s.).</li>
          <li>Linux: prevented a crash when a “barren” edition tried to run runAllTests_batch.praat.</li>
          <li>Scripting: `runSubprocess` and `runSystem` now support `asynchronous`, with which you can spawn a subprocess without waiting for it to finish. </li>
          <li>Scripting: `randomImax`.</li>
          <li>Scripting: in pause forms, allow vector expressions as defaults in vector fields.</li>
          <li>Scripting: syntax check against duplicate procedure names.</li>
          <li>Scripting: no longer any limits on the number of labels and procedures.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.51" date="2025-12-30">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.51</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Windows: switch back to the faster version (version 6.4.50 was deliberately slower, so as to support Windows 7 and 8.1 for the last time).</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.50" date="2025-12-29">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.50</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>A bit of speech recognition via Whisper.cpp (adapted to Praat by Anastasia Shchupak), such as **Transcribe interval** in the TextGrid window. This works after you install one or more Whisper-cpp models, such as Georgi Gerganov's `ggml-base.bin` in the `models` subfolder of the preferences folder.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.49" date="2025-12-23">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.49</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Open without error messages or warnings Kay files that have one sample too few or too many.</li>
          <li>Linux: the standard Linux edition now runs equally well on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and Centos.</li>
          <li>EditDistanceTable: made readable and writable.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.48" date="2025-12-09">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.48</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Linux audio: recognize JACK devices (next to the already recongized ALSA devices).</li>
          <li>Linux fonts: support for the Charis 7 font, as on macOS and Windows.</li>
          <li>OTGrammar: non-negative maximum entropy learning.</li>
          <li>Debug option at start-up from command line, e.g. `--debug=58`.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.47" date="2025-11-07">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.47</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>**Sound: To LPC...**: channel averaging by default.</li>
          <li>runSystem and runSubprocess should not divert a terminal window’s standard output.</li>
          <li>Repaired a bug from November 2014 by which writing a BarkSpectrogram to a binary file used an incorrect format.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.46" date="2025-10-20">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.46</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>ScriptEditor: made **Run selection** work again on Windows and Linux (bug since 6.4.44).</li>
          <li>Made pause windows (and perhaps Demo window) compatible with macOS 26 (Tahoe).</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.45" date="2025-10-13">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.45</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Made Picture window 60×60 inches (instead of 12×12).</li>
          <li>Windows: repaired a crashing bug in runSystem introduced in 6.4.44.</li>
          <li>Made progress bar writing compatible with macOS 26 (Tahoe).</li>
          <li>Repaired an old bug that could crash Praat when viewing a Table with 0 rows.</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.43" date="2025-09-14">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.43</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Calling Praat from the command line: the new switch --send-or-form sends a script to a different already running GUI instance of Praat, like --send does, but takes no arguments (except for the name of the script file) and presents a form on the screen if the script has a form in it.</li>
          <li>More detailed manual page for fileNames$# ().</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.42" date="2025-08-28">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.42</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Recognize more OGG sound files.</li>
          <li>Recognize the pre-2025 `sendpraat` message on Windows again (compatibility with Elan 7.0).</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.41" date="2025-08-21">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.41</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Faster computation of some formants (because of multithreading).</li>
          <li>Removed a bug that caused Praat to crash on Sound: To Formant (robust)....</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
    <release version="6.4.40" date="2025-08-16">
      <url type="details">https://github.com/praat/praat.github.io/releases/tag/v6.4.40</url>
      <description>
        <ul>
          <li>Faster computation of spectrograms and formants (because of multithreading).</li>
          <li>Full awareness of processors with up to 400 physical threads (i.e. 200 or 400 cores).</li>
        </ul>
      </description>
    </release>
  </releases>

  <provides>
    <id>praat.desktop</id>
  </provides>

  <icon type="stock">org.praat.Praat</icon>

  <categories>
    <category>Education</category>
    <category>Science</category>
    <category>Audio</category>
    <category>AudioVideo</category>
  </categories>

  <keywords>
    <keyword>audio</keyword>
    <keyword>sound</keyword>
    <keyword>speech</keyword>
    <keyword>phonetics</keyword>
    <keyword>linguistics</keyword>
  </keywords>

  <screenshots>
    <screenshot type="default">
      <image>https://praat.org/pictures/screenshot-1.png</image>
      <caption>Praat showing a spectrogram with pitch and formant listings of a synthesized speech sample</caption>
    </screenshot>
    <screenshot type="default">
      <image>https://praat.org/pictures/screenshot-2.png</image>
      <caption>A script opened in Praat's editor</caption>
    </screenshot>
    <screenshot type="default">
      <image>https://praat.org/pictures/screenshot-3.png</image>
      <caption>The object view in Praat, showing a few opened sounds</caption>
    </screenshot>
  </screenshots>

  <recommends>
    <control>keyboard</control>
    <control>pointing</control>
    <display_length compare="ge">768</display_length>
  </recommends>

  <launchable type="desktop-id">org.praat.Praat.desktop</launchable>
</component>