Installing Praat on Ubuntu - getting sound to work

Some Background

I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my Lenovo Yoga, and it’s time to reinstall Praat.

I’ve gotten Praat to work before on Ubuntu, but it was a pain. From what I can tell, a lot of Linux users hit this problem where they can see and edit sounds, but just not play them through speakers or headphones.

I remember reading a lot about alsa and pulsaudio, but not getting far.

Today I was on Praat’s website, looking through their installation page and their suggested steps to get Praat working, but then I thought installing from the latest source might be the solution. It’s strange, but there’s no mention that I could find of their source code being hosted on GitHub. They have a local version of the source, but I thought I’d just check on GitHub anyways.

Sure enough, there it was, and it was reassuring to see that Paul Boersma was the one who had made the latest commits.

So, I cloned from GitHub, did the install, and it worked! Since I couldn’t find other posts about the install and the GitHub page is little publicized on Praat’s home page, I will go through the steps here.

First, in case it’s relevant for others I’m going to show a little info about my current setup.

josh@yoga:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS
Release:	14.04
Codename:	trusty

You can see the exact kernel on my version of Ubuntu below:

josh@yoga:~$ uname -a
Linux yoga 3.19.0-43-generic #49~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 31 15:44:49 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Installing Dependencies

To install on Ubuntu (or any other unix-like system), we first need to install a few dependencies. Here’s the list:

Here’s the command to get both at once:

sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev libgtk2.0-dev

Installing Praat

To get the most update version of Praat, let’s clone it from GitHub and just save it on our desktop. Once it’s on our desktop.

josh@yoga:~/Desktop$ git clone https://github.com/praat/praat.git

If you do an ls or la on your Desktop, you should see a new, praat directory. Here are located all the files (Makefiles) to install it correctly. Let’s take a look at what we’ve just got:

josh@yoga:~/Desktop$ la praat
artsynth  dwsys   dwtools  external  fon   .gitattributes  gram  LPC   makefile   num        stat  test
contrib   dwtest  EEG      FFNet     .git  .gitignore      kar   main  makefiles  README.md  sys

Now we need to get the definitions that are specific to Linux for our makefiles. We need to be in our new praat directory and save the ones that are relevant to us to a new file, makefiles.defs.

josh@yoga:~/Desktop$ cd praat
josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ cp makefiles/makefile.defs.linux.alsa ./makefile.defs

Now that we’ve made this new makefiles.defs file, we can see it in our praat dir.

josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ la
artsynth  dwtest   external  .git            gram  main           makefiles  stat
contrib   dwtools  FFNet     .gitattributes  kar   makefile       num        sys
dwsys     EEG      fon       .gitignore      LPC   makefile.defs  README.md  test

Now we can install Praat with the standard make command.

You’re going to get a lot of output at the command line, and it may take a couple mintues to finish. Here’s the tail end of the output you should be getting.

josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ sudo make
                      .
                      .
                      .
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/josh/Desktop/praat/contrib/ola'
make -C main main_Praat.o 
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/josh/Desktop/praat/main'
g++ -std=c++11 -DUNIX -Dlinux -DALSA -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0` -Werror=missing-prototypes -Werror=implicit -Wreturn-type -Wunused -Wunused-parameter -Wuninitialized -O1 -g1 -pthread -Wshadow -I ../num -I ../sys -I ../fon  -c -o main_Praat.o main_Praat.cpp
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/josh/Desktop/praat/main'
g++ -o praat main/main_Praat.o  fon/libfon.a \
		contrib/ola/libOla.a artsynth/libartsynth.a \
		FFNet/libFFNet.a gram/libgram.a EEG/libEEG.a \
		LPC/libLPC.a dwtools/libdwtools.a \
		fon/libfon.a stat/libstat.a dwsys/libdwsys.a \
		sys/libsys.a num/libnum.a kar/libkar.a \
		external/espeak/libespeak.a external/portaudio/libportaudio.a \
		external/flac/libflac.a external/mp3/libmp3.a \
		external/glpk/libglpk.a external/gsl/libgsl.a \
		`pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0` -lm -lasound -lpthread

At this point you might think that you’re done, but if you try to run Praat from the command line, you get an error:

josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ praat
The program 'praat' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install praat

DO NOT RUN THAT COMMAND!

This error is telling you that the computer can’t find Praat, not that it’s not installed.

You do have Praat and it does work. To prove it, you can just run:

josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ ./praat

You should see that familiar, beautiful GUI.

So, to put Praat in the right place, you just copy that executable file ./praat to where it belongs. For Ubuntu users, this executable shoudl be in /usr/bin.

So, we simply copy the file to where it goes:

josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ sudo cp ./praat /usr/bin/.

Now you can run Praat from anywhere, and you should have sound!

josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ praat

You probably want to remove those source files on the Desktop, since you don’t need them anymore:

josh@yoga:~/Desktop/praat$ cd ..
josh@yoga:~/Desktop$ sudo rm -r praat

Enjoy your Praat!

Still having issues?

A friend of mine was still having problems with the sound after installing Praat on Linux, and he found a strange and simple solution. Here’s the thread on GitHub.

Apparently, if you have the NumLock function activated, you won’t be able to hit tab in Praat to play a section of audio. If this is the problem, you should still be able to play the sound by clicking on the gray rectangles of a highlighted section of audio under the spectrogram. If this is your issue, deactivate NumLock and try using tab. It might be that easy.