Installation

This guide is written under the assumption that you use some kind of Debian based Linux distribution. If you use a different operating system, you may need to adjust the installation instructions accordingly. First install conda or mamba and create a conda environment with the dependecies given in the environment.yml file.

Installing MFA

Go to MFAs website and follow the instructions here. Depending on your architecture you may need to install the version without CUDA support. in general code-block:: bash

conda create -n {language}_aligner -c conda-forge montreal-forced-aligner

should work. We expect you to create environments for each language you want to use. This makes running the aligner in parrallel easier.

We used the MFA version 3.1.3 for this project. code-block:: bash

conda install montreal-forced-aligner=3.1.3

This should downgrade the MFA to the correct version. Then download the correct dictorary and language model for your language, they must be those for the MFA phoneme set. Currently we only support English and German. Do this by running the following commands. code-block:: bash

mfa model download dictionary german_mfa mfa model download acoustic german_mfa # or for english mfa model download acoustic english_mfa mfa model download dictionary english_mfa

Check that alignement works by testing it on a small dataset. Importantly, do not activate the conda environment before running create_vtl_corpus, since the code does that for you, keeping both installations separate.

fastText

fastText Models are downloaded for you by the create_vtl_corpus package. If you want to use a custom model rename it to “cc.{language_it_is_for}.300.bin” and place it in the “create_vtl_corpus/create_vtl_corpus/resources directory