Editing tracks

There are two ways to manually edit formant tracks using Fast Track:

1. By selecting a sound file and a corresponding Formant object in the Praat object window. Then selecting the "Fast Track > Edit formants (sound)" button. This lets you edit the single file you have selected.

2. By selecting the "Edit folder" option from the "Fast Track > Tools" menu, after a folder analysis has been carried out. This lets you edit many files at once.

In either case, the process to edit any single track is described below.

The Editing Process

The editing process is a loop, depicted below. When editing a folder of files, a new file is opened each time the user exits the loop.

The general process for editing tracks is as follows:

1. You enter the loop. You will see a spectrogram of the sound and the corresponding analysis. You are asked: is the tracking acceptable? If yes, click finish and the loop exits. If it needs editing, click Edit and proceed to step 2. In the example above, some F3 measurements are noisy and unreliable.

2. If editing is selected, Fast Track converts the Formant object into a FormantGrid object so that it can be manually edited. Another window opens up showing the FormantGrid object. If you learn the hotkeys for this, manual editing can be quite fast in many cases. When you are happy with it hit 'ok' on the 'Done Editing' pause window. In the example above, I have erased the noisier measurements.

When you finish editing and hit ok, the loop will return to step 1. The edited tracks will be compared to the spectrogram, and you will again be asked if the tracks are acceptable. In the example above, we see that the edited tracks are a truer representation of the spectrogram. Clicking finish will exit the loop, while hitting Edit will allow you to edit the tracks further.