Extracting annotations and media at the same time

ELAN
1

Hi!

I have very large CHAT and WAV files that I need to import into ELAN. I can do this and successfully save as an .eaf file.

If I then want to then isolate only a couple of minutes of the annotation and audio (no video) and create a standalone file so I can continue annotating, what is the best way to go about that? I have tried ‘save selection as .eaf’ but I just get stuck here:

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It never does save it. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Any suggestions?

Thank you so much :slightly_smiling_face:

2

Hi, what happens exactly: does the Progress window never disappear? Or are the files just not there?
In either case, if the menu is accessible afterwards the log (View->View Log…) might contain some information about the process. I’ve occasionally seen that the files were saved in a different folder than intended.
Does saving the selection work if you leave the “Clip media for the selection…” deselected, in order to narrow down the actual cause of the problem?

-Han

3

Hi Han,

Thanks for your reply!

  • The progress window never disappears.
  • I tried it with a two second extract and it worked fine; I was able to extract both the audio and annotations into a single .eaf file; the portions I need to extract now are 5 minutes long. How long should that take? Is it just that I’m not waiting long enough for it to process?
  • In View Log, I see that it’s being saved to correct file location.
  • saving the 5-min selection without the ‘clip media’ doesn’t work either. Here’s the log from my last attempt

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4

Hello again,

I tried deleting the elan.psfx from .elan_data and problem solved! I was able to a) extract audio and annotations as an .eaf and b) it generated a separate audio clip.

But when I tried to recreate the process, it won’t even let me import a .cha file at all :sob:

5

Hi,

First of all: how long it takes to clip 5 min of audio is difficult to say, but I guess that if you waited a few minutes and the process hasn’t finished yet, it is safe to assume something went wrong. In the case of success the log probably contains some lines produced by the tool that did the clipping (e.g. ffmpeg). In case of failure there might be messages produced by the clipping tool, or, like in the above case, produced by ELAN. The messages seem to indicate that there are several annotations with a start time that equals the end time (which should not be the case). So, it might be that success in saving a selection depends on whether or not such annotations are part of the selection (I might be wrong about this).

I doubt whether deleting elan.pfsx really made the difference (again, I can be wrong).
I don’t know why the .cha import failed at some point. Was this a different file than earlier imports? Maybe the import was attempted after an error occurred and a relaunch of ELAN could solve the problem?

Did you try to convert the .cha files to ELAN by means of the CLAN command chat2elan? That might be a better approach to transferring such data to ELAN.