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Release notes

Most recent releases:

Aug 17, 2023: Release 6.6

This release is primarily a bug fix release but has some new features too.

The main changes are:

  • a new function to modify the start and/or end time of all annotations on selected tiers. For both the left and the right boundary a number of milliseconds can be set. Can be applied to a single document, the current document, or to multiple files.
  • two new options in the FLEx import; it is now possible to use the speaker ID as tier prefix and to specify the preferred item type for the phrase level top tier
  • a preliminary dark theme or dark mode is now available, based on the cross-platform Java Look and Feel. Some hard-coded colours were removed here and there, then fore- and background colours are more or less 'flipped', resulting in a non-optimal (e.g. icons are not always adapted) dark mode. The Look and Feel can be set in the Platform/OS preferences panel.
  • the Whisper recognizer now also supports the experimental word-level timestamps as exported in the .srt output file

The fixes and minor changes are:

  • regular expression search with the \b word boundary matcher didn't work for all Unicode characters in the previous release, this should now work again
  • working in Transcription Mode could cause ELAN to crash, especially when using diacritics. This has been repaired now.
  • ELAN would sometimes freeze when scrolling horizontally in the Timeline viewer while the media is playing, especially when scrolling with a trackpad. This shouldn't happen anymore.
  • in Segmentation Mode the keyboard shortcuts of controlled vocabulary entries now also work in the press-hold-release workflow
  • fixed a problem with manual tier selection and user interface updates in the Fleiss' kappa compare annotators workflow
  • loading a file in Interlinearization mode sometimes didn't work due to an invalid stored preference, this has been repaired
  • changes in some default settings:
    • the Spectrogram viewer is now hidden by default (can be made visible in the View->Viewer menu)
    • the extraction of audio tracks from video (for waveform visualisation) is now turned off by default (can be turned on in the Platform/OS preference panel)

    Users now have to switch these functions on deliberately and be aware of possible performance consequences.

  • two macOS M1 specific problems were solved:
    • the VLCJ based player didn't work due to incompatible (native) libraries
    • the same for spell checking with Hunspell, a different library is now used for this integration

July 15, 2021: Release of Simple-ELAN 1.4

This is a maintenance release which is functionally almost the same as the 1.3 release. It includes a newer Java version (OpenJDK 14) and has the latest updates of the main ELAN distribution.

The main changes are:

  • minor changes in the behavior of the VLC player, harmonizing it with that of other player frameworks
  • attempts are made to solve a problem with the video not scaling to its designated size
  • like in ELAN, on Windows and macOS a waveform is now also shown if a video is linked without a .wav file
    (there are some known issues on macOS with this, see the release notes of ELAN 6.2)

Earlier releases