vLabeler support for TextGrid

This repository contains a set of labeler and plugins for vLabeler to support TextGrid files.

Requirements

vLabeler 1.0.0-beta20 or later.

Contents

• labelers
  • textgrid-labeler: labeler for TextGrid files
• plugins
  • macro
    • textgrid-mark-tier-relations: Used to mark parent-child relations between existing tiers
    • textgrid-merge-to-next-tier: Used to create/update a parent tier using a child tier with relations tags
    • textgrid-manage-module: Used to manage modules (sub-projects) in the project

Important notes

1. The labeler currently only supports the IntervalTier tier, so PointTier will be ignored and will not be exported. Please backup your original TextGrid files before using the labeler if you have PointTier tiers.
2. The labeler only recognize .TextGrid extension, so please rename your files if they have other extensions in prior.

Preview

Download

See Releases.

Installation

1. Open Menu Settings -> Labelers...
2. Click + and select the downloaded textgrid.labeler.json file
3. Open Menu Tools -> Batch Edit -> Manage Plugins...
4. Click + and select the all the downloaded plugin.json files in the plugins folder
5. Instead of 4, you can also click the Open directory button and paste all the plugin folders into the opened macro folder.

Project creation

1. Make your files look like the following structure:

   your_project
   ├── wav
   │   ├── file1.wav
   │   ├── file2.wav
   │   └── file3.wav
   └── TextGrid
       ├── file1.TextGrid
       ├── file2.TextGrid
       └── file3.TextGrid
   

   If you don't have TextGrid files yet, you can leave the TextGrid folder empty.
2. Open the New project page of vLabeler
3. Select the your_project folder (its name can be any text) as the SampleDirectory.
4. Select Labeler TextGrid labeler
5. If you have different names for the wav and TextGrid folders, you can change them in the labeler's settings (the gear button next to it).
6. Complete other settings as you wish and create the project.

Adjust existing TextGrid files

If you have existing TextGrid files, you can see several module tabs in the created project, like:

- file1.wav_1_tier1
- file1.wav_1_tier2
- file2.wav_1_tier1
- file2.wav_1_tier2

The name of the module should be in the format of <file_name>.wav_<tier_index>_<tier_name>.

If your tiers are not related, which means you don't need to make sure the boundaries in different tiers are aligned, you can just do the adjustment in each module independently.

However, in many cases, we have parent-child relations between tiers, like:

phoneme:  | a | k | a | s | a |
note:     | a |   ka  |   sa  |
sentence: |     a ka sa       |

So we may want to adjust the boundaries synchronously in all the tiers related.

To do this, we can use the plugins with the following steps:

1. Run TextGrid - Mark tier relations plugin. Please read carefully the instructions in the plugin dialog and fill in the correct variables. After execution, parent entry names will be set as tags of the child entries. e.g.

   phoneme:  |    a (a)     |  k (ka) | a (ka)  |  s (sa) | a (sa)  |
   note:     | a (a ka sa)  |   ka (a ka sa)    |   sa (a ka sa)    |
   sentence: |                     a ka sa                          |
   

2. Adjust the boundaries and label names in the most detailed tier (e.g. phoneme tier in the example above). After adjustment, it may look like:

   phoneme:  |    a (a)      | k (ka) | a (ka) |   s (sa) | a (sa)  |
   note:     | a (a ka sa)  |   ka (a ka sa)    |   sa (a ka sa)    |
   sentence: |                     a ka sa                          |
   

3. Run TextGrid - Merge to update next tier plugin in the most detailed tier. We will get the next tier updated like:

   phoneme:  |    a (a)      | k (ka) | a (ka) |   s (sa) | a (sa)  |
   note:     | a (a ka sa)   |  ka (a ka sa)   |   sa (a ka sa)     |
   sentence: |                     a ka sa                          |
   

4. Repeat step 2 and 3 until the top tier is updated. The TextGrid - Merge to update next tier plugin also have settings to allow batch process for multiple tiers and/or multiple sample files. Please check the plugin's settings for details.

Create TextGrid files from scratch

If we want to create TextGrid files from scratch, we get a empty project including tabs like:

- file1.wav_1_default
- file2.wav_1_default

default is a default tier name. We can rename it by the TextGrid - Manage module plugin.

If we want to create tiers with parent-child relations, we can do the same steps 2 and 3 as the previous section.

Note that the plugin TextGrid - Merge to update next tier will create a new tier if the given next tier doesn't exist, so you don't need to create the next tier manually.

You can add, remove, rename and duplicate modules by the TextGrid - Manage module plugin as you like, but please note that the plugin doesn't block all the possible errors, so you will need to double-check the module names before running other plugins or export.

Export TextGrid files

You can choose any of the following methods to export TextGrid files:

1. Menu File -> Export...: Export the TextGrid file for the current wav file to a certain file.
2. Menu File -> Export Overwriting: Export the TextGrid file for the current wav file to the original TextGrid file (if not existing, create as <project>/TextGrid/<wavFileName>.TextGrid).
3. Menu File -> Export Overwriting All: Export all the TextGrid files in the project to the corresponding original TextGrid files.

Tips

1. You can click the module name labels on the left side of the tier view to switch to another module.
2. You can click any entry in the tier view to switch to that tier and jump to the entry.
3. You can use menu Navigate -> Go to Next/Previous Sub-project to switch between tiers. You can also set the keyboard shortcuts for these actions in the Settings -> Preferences... -> Keymap -> Key actions page.
4. Dragging when multiple tiers exist will be snapped to entries in other tiers.
5. You can use the plugin quick launch feature to easily run plugins with a set of parameters.