What's new?

Latest changes in Praat.

6.6.30 (30 June 2026)

  • Tutorial documentation on speech recognition.
  • Removed a crashing bug when cross-correlating or convolving two MFCC objects.
  • A bit of spectrogram colouring.

6.4.67 (21 May 2026)

  • Include Anastasia Shchupak as Praat’s third author.
  • Made the Voice Report give “undefined” H1-minus-H2 values (instead of an error message) if there are zero pulses.

6.4.66 (18 May 2026)

  • Much faster automatic transcription on Windows and Linux.
  • Standalone diarization.
  • Corrected a crash in sorting an Eigen object (could affect discriminant analysis).
  • Removed a bug introduced in 6.4.52 by which running a log script in the Sound window would stop any pending pause window.

6.4.65 (24 April 2026)

  • Fixed a bug that could lead to a “Text is not valid UTF-8” error message in automatic transcription.
  • More windows recognize Command-Q (Quit Praat).

6.4.64 (17 April 2026)

  • Many small improvements and bug repairs in speech recognition, including automatic alignment and diarization.

6.4.63 (4 April 2026)

  • Speaker diarization in Transcribe interval (if Whisper models installed).
  • Mac: Command-mousewheel zooming (as on Windows).

6.4.62 (13 March 2026)

  • Sound: To TextGrid (speech activity, Silero)...: “voice activity detection” by AI.
  • TextGrid window: fixed a bug from 2013 or earlier that could cause Praat to crash during interval alignment.
  • Fixed a bug that caused Praat to crash if a notebook was run twice.
  • Linux: support horizontal scrolling in three ways (two-finger swiping on the touchpad; left and right tilting of the mouse’s scroll wheel; turning the mouse’s scroll wheel while keeping the Shift key pressed).
  • Linux: support zooming by turning the mouse’s scroll wheel while keeping the Ctrl key pressed).

6.4.61 (28 February 2026)

  • Transcribe interval (via automatic speech recognition): better word alignment via Whisper’s built-in DTW.
  • Transcribe interval (via automatic speech recognition): option for silence removal (via an additionally installed AI model).
  • Windows: Ctrl+Alt+Letter menu shortcuts have become Ctrl+Shift+Letter, because that’s the way it’s nowadays done in e.g. browsers and NotePad, and because Ctrl+Alt+Letter combinations can stand for actual Alt-GR characters on some keyboards. On the Mac we still use Option+Command+Letter. Note that on most Windows keyboards the Ctrl and Alt keys are adjacent, as are the Option and Command keys on most Mac keyboards.
  • Manual: menu shortcuts for Previous page and Next page.

6.4.60 (10 February 2026)

  • Scripting: fixed an interaction between pause windows and `exitScript`.
  • Scripting: turned cases of multiple identical procedure names into once-warnings instead of errors.

6.4.59 (5 February 2026)

  • Made nested scripts with pause windows and/or Demo window work again.
  • Fixed a bug by which SpeechRecognizer creation could make Praat crash on some platforms.

6.4.58 (25 January 2026, supersedes versions 6.4.52 through 6.4.57)

  • MacOS Tahoe: support making menu choices or turning windows to full screen if a script is paused (by the Demo window or the Pause window), as on earlier MacOS versions and on Windows and Linux.
  • Windows: support horizontal scrolling in three ways (two-finger swiping on the touchpad; left and right tilting of the mouse’s scroll wheel; turning the mouse’s scroll wheel while keeping the Shift key pressed).
  • Windows: better dotted or dashed thick lines.
  • Sound: To PowerCepstrogram... now averages the power over channels instead of taking only channel 1.
  • Opening TIFF files with Read from file..., as well as Insert picture from file...: rid a bug that would show monochrome TIFF files in four vertical stripes.
  • Mac and Linux: made Insert picture from file... work for PDF files again (bug since 6.4.28).
  • Backslash trigraph for apico-postalveolars: ṣ (`s\.v`), following Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), who wanted to distinguish them from the more extreme retroflexes, i.e. apico-palatals such as ʂ (`\s.`).
  • Linux: prevented a crash when a “barren” edition tried to run `runAllTests_batch.praat`.
  • Scripting: `runSubprocess` and `runSystem` now support `asynchronous`, with which you can spawn a subprocess without waiting for it to finish.
  • Scripting: `randomImax`.
  • Scripting: in pause forms, allow vector expressions as defaults in vector fields.
  • Scripting: syntax check against duplicate procedure names.
  • Scripting: no longer any limits on the number of labels and procedures.

6.4.51 (30 December 2025)

  • Windows: switch back to the faster version (version 6.4.50 was deliberately slower, so as to support Windows 7 and 8.1 for the last time).

6.4.50 (29 December 2025)

  • A bit of speech recognition via Whisper.cpp (adapted to Praat by Anastasia Shchupak), such as Transcribe interval in the TextGrid window. This works after you install one or more Whisper-cpp models, such as `ggml-base.bin` (from `https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp`) in the `models` subfolder of the preferences folder.

6.4.49 (23 December 2025)

  • Open without error messages or warnings Kay files that have one sample too few or too many.
  • Linux: the standard Linux edition now runs equally well on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and Centos.
  • EditDistanceTable: made readable and writable.

6.4.48 (9 December 2025)

  • Linux audio: recognize JACK devices (next to the already recongized ALSA devices).
  • Linux fonts: support for the Charis 7 font, as on macOS and Windows.
  • OTGrammar: non-negative maximum entropy learning.
  • Debug option at start-up from command line, e.g. `--debug=58`.

6.4.47 (7 November 2025)

  • Sound: To LPC...: channel averaging by default.
  • `runSystem` and `runSubprocess` should not divert a terminal window’s standard output.
  • Repaired a bug from November 2014 by which writing a BarkSpectrogram to a binary file used an incorrect format.

6.4.46 (20 October 2025)

  • ScriptEditor: made Run selection work again on Windows and Linux (bug since 6.4.44).
  • Made pause windows (and perhaps Demo window) compatible with macOS 26 (Tahoe).

6.4.45 (12 October 2025)

  • Made Picture window 60×60 inches (instead of 12×12).
  • Windows: repaired a crashing bug in `runSystem` introduced in 6.4.44.
  • Made progress bar writing compatible with macOS 26 (Tahoe).
  • Repaired an old bug that could crash Praat when viewing a Table with 0 rows.

6.4.44 (25 September 2025)

  • Made `runSubprocess` compatible with the Microsoft runtime (instead of MinGW).
  • Made Info window writing compatible with macOS 26 (Tahoe).
  • Made `demoShow` compatible with macOS 26.
  • Made ScriptEditor menus reachable on macOS 26 when the script is paused.

6.4.43 (14 September 2025)

  • Calling Praat from the command line: the new switch `--send-or-form` sends a script to a different already running GUI instance of Praat, like `--send` does, but takes no arguments (except for the name of the script file) and presents a form on the screen if the script has a `form` in it.
  • More detailed manual page for `fileNames$#` ().

6.4.42 (28 August 2025)

  • Recognize more OGG sound files.
  • Recognize the pre-2025 `sendpraat` message on Windows again (compatibility with Elan 7.0).

6.4.41 (21 August 2025)

  • Faster computation of some formants (because of multithreading).
  • Removed a bug that caused Praat to crash on Sound: To Formant (robust)....

6.4.40 (16 August 2025)

  • Faster computation of spectrograms and some formants (because of multithreading).
  • Full awareness of processors with up to 400 physical threads (i.e. 200 or 400 cores).

6.4.39 (13 July 2025)

  • Calibrated cepstral peak prominence (PowerCepstrogram: Get CPPS...).
  • Windows: restored “@”, “~” and “\” on Latin-American Spanish keyboards.

6.4.38 (1 July 2025)

  • Macintosh and Windows: put back Charis SIL 6.200 for downloading with older Praat versions.
  • PairDistribution: Set weight....
  • OTGrammarEditor: removed a bug by which the window wouldn’t update automatically after learning.

6.4.37 (28 June 2025)

  • Macintosh and Windows: support for the Charis 7 font.

6.4.36 (25 June 2025)

  • Sound window: restore loudspeaker icon (for multi-channel sounds; bug since 6.4.31).
  • Scripting: function `moveAndOrRenameFile` ().
  • FLAC 1.5.0.
  • Scripting on Windows: more Command-key combinations with `demoKey$` in Demo window.

6.4.35 (15 June 2025)

  • Pitch analysis: guard against zero pitch floor if logarithmic.
  • Scripting: `fixed$` () for vectors and matrices.
  • Linux: removed hard-coded background colour.
  • Full website `https://praat.org` now mirrors `https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat` (to prevent down time).

6.4.34 (20 May 2025)

  • Linux: made `demoShow` () work again on GTK 3.
  • Scripting: `clock` ().

6.4.33 (18 May 2025)

  • H1-minus-H2 in the voice report.
  • Repaired an old bug that made spectrogram computation in the Sound window crash under some uncommon combinations of settings.

6.4.32 (14 May 2025)

  • Better continuity of integration of energy (finally corresponds to manual).
  • Scripting: more reliable `random_initializeWithSeedUnsafelyButPredictably` (works even after an odd number of `randomGauss`).

6.4.31 (3 May 2025)

  • TextGrid window: rubber banding within the selection, by dragging a boundary while keeping the Option and Command keys pressed (plus the Shift key, if you want to drag in all tiers).
  • Backslash trigraphs: s̬ (`s\vv`), m͜b (`m\LIb`), ⱱ (`\V^`), d̸ (`d\//`), d̶ (`d\-/`), ɭ̴ (`\l.\~/`).
  • Unicode 16.0.

6.4.30 (29 April 2025)

  • Made the whole of the Buckeye corpus readable.
  • Backslash trigraphs for tone symbols: a᷄ (`a\-'`), a᷇ (`a\'-`), a᷅ (`a\``-`), a᷆ (`a\-```), a᷈ (`a\rf`), a᷉ (`a\fr`).
  • Other backslash trigraphs: d̼ (`d\mv`), d̫ (`d\wv`).

6.4.29 (27 April 2025)

  • Read Sound and adjacent annotation files (TIMIT)...: if you open any sound file from the TIMIT corpus, the annotation files with the same name in the same folder are interpreted as a TextGrid and opened as well.
  • Read Sound and adjacent annotation files (Buckeye)...: if you open any sound file from the Buckeye corpus, the annotation files with the same name in the same folder are interpreted as a TextGrid and opened as well.
  • Backslash trigraphs for tone symbols: a̋ (`a\''`), ȁ (`a\`````), ˥ (`\-5`), ˦ (`\-4`), ˧ (`\-3`), ˨ (`\-2`), ˩ (`\-1`), ꜛ (`\|u`), ꜜ (`\|d`).
  • Backslash trigraphs for diagonal arrows: ↗ (`\NE`), ↘ (`\SE`), ↙ (`\SW`), ↖ (`\NW`); the first two of these double as tone symbols.

6.4.28 (22 April 2025)

  • TextGrid window: removed a bug that caused slow scrolling (i.e. computation of whole-sound Pitch and Formant objects) if the TextGrid was much longer than the Sound and the Sound was scrolled out of sight.
  • EEG window: repaired a bug that caused Praat to crash when clicking View & Edit.
  • Windows Demo window: made Escape key available to `demoKey$()` (this had been a bug since the beginning of the Demo window, i.e. since May 2009).
  • Read TextGrid from ESPS label file...
  • Repaired a bug that could cause Praat to crash on pitch analysis when a part of the sound was constant.
  • Insert picture from file...: the picture is now embedded into Praat picture files; this also solves a problem with file paths that surfaced when a script called another script that inserted a picture.
  • Photo: Save as PNG file...: repaired a bug that caused a crash on the Mac.

6.4.27 (27 January 2025)

  • Graphics text: better pipes and slashes.
  • Windows for ARM64 processors: removed a bug whereby dynamic menu deletion could crash after a sound was played in the Demo window.

6.4.26 (8 January 2025)

  • Rectangle text (maximal fit)... is perhaps useful in general, but will especially facilitate text and button drawing in Demo window.
  • Linux for ARM64 processors: sped up some slow computations by a factor of over 100.
  • OTGrammar & Strings & Strings: Tabulate all correct rankings lists all full rankings that map the given list of inputs to the given list of partial outputs, using brute-force permutation of up to 18 constraints.
  • OTGrammar: Tabulate equivalent pairs checks to what extent different candidates have different sets of constraint violations.

6.4.25 (8 December 2024)

  • Command-line interface: solved a crash that occurred when a menu command was not available.
  • Windows: open-source code signing.

6.4.24 (1 December 2024)

  • FormantPath: fixed bug with sampling frequency.
  • Formant measurements: fixed bugs in “autocorrelation” and “robust” methods.
  • Manual: better support for screens taller than 15 inches.
  • Scripting: support for subtraction and unary minus for tensors.
  • Scripting: removed `sendsocket`.

6.4.23 (27 October 2024)

  • Audio output: higher-quality playback of sounds with unusual sampling frequencies.
  • Scripting: better error messages on Save commands.
  • Better HTML output from manuals (e.g. italicized or bolded backslash sequences).

6.4.22 (5 October 2024)

  • More robustness against trying to run a binary file as a script.
  • Windows Sound window: faster zooming with Ctrl-scrollwheel.
  • Windows: guarantee Explorer-type file selection windows.

6.4.21 (21 September 2024)

  • SpeechSynthesizer: repaired an old bug whereby Get phonemes from text... could increase the duration of a subsequent Play (or To Sound...).
  • SpeechSynthesizer and TextGrid alignment: repaired a bug (existing since 6.4.18) whereby clause and word tiers would be empty.
  • TextGrid window: disambiguated Command-F5 (now Option-F5 for Get minimum pitch; likewise, Option-F8 for Get minimum intensity).
  • Calling Praat from command line: reenabled `--pref-dir=` option.

6.4.20 (18 September 2024)

  • Linux: repaired a major bug whereby Praat could crash when trying to draw to a hidden Picture window.
  • Scripting: just like normal forms, pause forms now also accept “yes” and “off” (and the like) instead of just 1 and 0.
  • Scripting: repaired a minor bug whereby `optionmenu` in forms would show an incorrect default value.

6.4.19 (4 September 2024)

  • Repaired many bugs in the eSpeak part of Praat.

6.4.18 (21 August 2024)

  • SpeechSynthesizer and TextGrid alignment: solved an eSpeak-internal bug that caused some rare long phoneme codes to be handled incorrectly.
  • Scripting: `padLeft$`(), `truncateLeft$`() and `padOrTruncateLeft$`(), and their `Right` counterparts.
  • s390x edition for Linux.

6.4.17 (8 August 2024)

  • Spectrogram: Paint: solved a bug that could cause Praat to crash if the time domain was smaller than that of the Spectrogram.
  • ScriptEditor: Run selection can call procedures outside the selected text.
  • Audio files: can open Polyphone (Shorten) files.

6.4.16 (29 July 2024)

  • Windows: make command-line output visible (new on ARM64, was lost in 6.4.14 for Intel64 and Intel32).

6.4.15 (26 July 2024)

  • Distinguish between pitch ceiling (flat) and pitch top (curved ceiling), mainly because of their different meanings.

6.4.14 (22 July 2024)

  • Pitch menu (in e.g. Sound or TextGrid window): separate settings for four pitch analysis methods.
  • Formant analysis: faster on all systems.
  • ARM64 Windows: worked around a compiler bug that caused incorrect window sizes.
  • Pitch analysis: faster on Windows (Intel64 and Intel32).
  • Windows: better fonts and background colours (perhaps dependent on language settings).
  • TextGrids: Concatenate: guard against some incorrect TextGrid files.

6.4.13 (10 June 2024)

  • More manual pages.
  • Sounds: Concatenate with overlap...: guard against a crash that would occur if the total overlap time was longer than the original sounds together.
  • `number` recognizes hexadecimal numbers again (bug since February 2023).

6.4.12 (2 May 2024)

  • Align interval: fewer error messages.

6.4.11 (26 April 2024)

  • Menu commands that call a script (e.g. those that were added from a plug-in) are now visible as such by being marked with a little “+” sign.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the SpeechSynthesizer to mishandle European characters with accents on Linux.

6.4.10 (21 April 2024)

  • Function windows: fixed a problem that could cause Praat to crash when doing all after Group when windows had a different duration.

6.4.09 (20 April 2024)

  • TextGrid window: fixed a rare problem with Align interval that could lead to a zero-length interval.
  • Windows ARM64 edition: fixed a bug that would cause Align interval to crash.
  • Sound & TextGrid: Align interval... now also available in the Objects window.

6.4.08 (14 April 2024)

  • Windows: fixed a problem with the right and bottom edges of windows (half-visible scroll bars) for the Intel editions (the ARM64 edition still has this problem).
  • Scripting: fixed a bug that could cause Praat to crash when an unknown choice was given to an option menu.
  • MelSpectrogram: fixed a bug that could cause Praat to crash if a mel value was negative.
  • DataModeler: improved confidence limits on estimated model parameters.

6.4.07 (17 March 2024)

  • The command Sound & Pitch: To PointProcess (cc), which is also used when computing the times of pulses in the Sound window, could cause Praat to freeze when the pitch ceiling (and the measured pitch) were very high; this problem existed since at least 2001.
  • eSpeak: new version, with e.g. Tigrinya.
  • Support for 119-dpi graphics on Windows.
  • Repaired a bug that could cause the Artword windows to crash if the Time field was left empty.

6.4.06 (25 February 2024)

  • Sound files on Windows: corrected a bug (existing since July 2021) that prevented reading FLAC files with special characters in their names.
  • FormantPathEditor without Sound: corrected several bugs that caused Praat to crash (such as Formant listing, using the Pitch menu...).
  • Spectrogram painting: improved painting of very quiet spectrograms at extreme dynamic ranges.
  • Scripting: `folderExists`.
  • Scripting: home-relative paths (such as `~/sounds/*.wav`) in more locations, such as `fileNames$#`, Create Strings as file list..., and `createFolder`.

6.4.05 (27 January 2024)

  • Many typos in manual.
  • Made TIMIT label files readable on Windows.
  • Prevented 8000 files from being read at start-up.
  • Mac and Linux scripting: `fileReadable` now returns 0 if the argument is a folder (as already on Windows).

6.4.04 (6 January 2024)

  • Typo in example script in manual.
  • ARM64 edition for Linux (Ubuntu 20.04 and up).
  • ARM64 edition for Chromebook (2020 and later).

6.4.03 (4 January 2024)

  • ARM64 edition for Windows.
  • ARM64 edition for Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 and up).
  • ARM64 edition for Chromebook (2022 and later).

6.4.02 (30 December 2023)

  • Saving sounds as MP3 files.

6.4.01 (30 November 2023)

  • Removed some visible percent signs before variable names from the scripting tutorial.
  • SoundEditor/TextGridEditor logging: when logging 'f0', Praat now correctly reports values in Hz (rather than logarithms) if Unit is set to “Hertz (logarithmic)”. This bug had existed since Praat version 4.3.16 (June 2005).
  • SoundEditor/TextGridEditor scripting compatibility: made old versions of “Pitch settings...” and “Advanced pitch settings...” available to scripts again, made the old denominations “autocorrelation” and “cross-correlation” (as pitch analysis methods) available to scripts again, and made obsolete versions of pitch analysis settings (such as “Pitch silence threshold”) available again, now under the COMPATIBILITY section of the output of “Editor info”. This will allow older editor scripts to continue to run without change.

## What used to be new?

  • What was new in 6.4?
  • What was new in 6.3?
  • What was new in 6.2?
  • What was new in 6.1?
  • What was new in 6.0?
  • What was new in 5.4?
  • What was new in 5.3?
  • What was new in 5.2?
  • What was new in 5.1?
  • What was new in 5.0?
  • What was new in 4.6?
  • What was new in 4.5?
  • What was new in 4.4?
  • What was new in 4.3?
  • What was new in 4.2?
  • What was new in 4.1?
  • What was new in 4.0?
  • What was new in 3.9?
  • What was new in 3.8?
  • What was new in 3.7?
  • What was new in 3.6?
  • What was new in 3.5?
  • What was new in 3.3?
  • What was new in 3.2?
  • What was new in 3.1?