Prak installation details

Prak README already has quite elaborated instructions. If you need to know more, here we go.

Prerequisities

You need to install these prerequisities:

• python3
• PyTorch with torchaudio (CPU version is enough, choose Conda or Pip)

There are many ways to do it and the sites above document them very well. (README suggests mambaforge but there are many alternatives.)

Verify that pytorch is available

You can verify that packages are really available. With activated virtual environment (e.g. in Miniforge Prompt on Windows, or after "mamba activate" on Mac), run python:

python3

and at the ">>>" prompt type:

import torch
import torchaudio

If no errors appear, you won! Quit python with Ctrl+D (^D) and try prak.

Download via git or zip?

Certainly via git! The only reason for zip might be that you do not have git installed. With git, you get super easy updates using just:

git pull

If you initially downloaded zip, it still pays off to install git and use it for all the future updates.

Install at different location

The secret kept from the general public is that you can in fact put both mambaforge and prak anywhere you want. Just update configuration paths in the beginning of prak/prak_align_phrase.praat (that's the script which you will add on the Align by prak button in praat, so you will have it open in praat script editor anyway). There is something like:

       prak$ = "C:\prak"
       mambaforge$ = "C:\mambaforge"

Feel free to change it for example to:

       prak$ = "C:\Users\Ferda\prak"
       mambaforge$ = "C:\Users\Ferda\mambaforge"

There is also location of the file with additional pronunciation rules (which you may add there), by default it is in the prak folder:

       exceptions$ = prak$ + "\exceptions.txt"

but you can put it elsewhere, just change the exceptions$ variable.

As you see, on Windows things are by default directly in the root of disk C:\. For Mac and Linux this is different, default is your home folder:

       prak$ = "~/prak"
       mambaforge$ = "~/mambaforge"

and you can reconfigure this as well if you wish.