Praat textgrid alignment problem

ELAN
1

Hi,

I have 2 videos and 1 .wav file, which I have aligned in ELAN using the Media Synchronisation mode. I have a textgrid that was written in Praat (based on the .wav file) that I have imported to ELAN, but it does not match up with the sound from the .wav file, probably because of the offset from alignment.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks!

2

Hi,

It sounds like you could use the Shift Annotations function to re-align the imported annotations with the sound from the .wav file. This function is described in this section of the manual.

-Han

3

Hi Han,

Thanks for your help. The Shift Annotations function looks like what I need. I’m having an issue using it though. My audio file is about 2 seconds ahead of my textgrid, meaning I need to shift my annotations to the left (using a negative number of milliseconds). I can use Shift All Annotations to move the annotations to the right (using a positive number of milliseconds) but not to the left; instead it says ‘the value must be greater than 0’.

Do you know a way around this?

Thanks again for your help,

Matthew

4

Hi Matthew,

It is possible to shift annotations to the left, but only as much as there is “free space” before the first annotation on a particular tier or on all tiers (like in your example). I guess there must be an annotation starting at time stamp “0” on a tier and that prevents shifting to the left. If that is indeed the case, you should first manually delete the annotation(s) that is/are inside the first 2 seconds and then shift the remaining annotations to the left.
The reason for this is that the Shift Annotations function currently does not allow to delete annotations or modify annotations’ lengths implicitly.

-Han

5

Hi Han,

Thanks for this suggestion, it has worked well. Just for anyone else reading this, I used to ALT key to select the first annotations on all rows to delete. I then placed the red cursor before the first remaining annotation and selected All Tiers, Right off Crosshair… (in Shift Annotations), then used the same offset that I had used for the .wav file (e.g. -504ms).

Best,

Matthew