6.2 Menu item Preferences

The Preferences... command opens a dialog window with the tabs Project, Speakers, Recording,Playback, Control,Prompting, Annotation and Logging.
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Figure 6Settings > Project... command

6.2.1 Tab Project
The Project tab (fig. 6) presents the project name, optional UUID and optional description. The purpose of the UUID is to distinguish different projects with the same name in the future.

6.2.2 Tab Speakers
The Speakers tab contains the location of the speaker database. This database can be stored in the project directory, or any other accessible location in the local file system.

6.2.3 Tab Recording
The Recording tab allows the user to set the recording parameters. The tab has the subtabs Device, Channel routing, Format and Options. In the Device tab (fig. 7) you can select the recording device SpeechRecorder should use for this project.

Tab Channel routing In the Channel routing tab it is possible to specify arbitrary connections between recording device channels and output file channels. This is only necessary for advanced recording setups.

Tab Format The sample rate, quantization, byte order, encoding, number of channels can be chosen in the Format tab.

Tab Options In the Options tab you can set the following parameters:

Audio capture scope If set to ITEM the capture device is opened and closed for each recording, if set to SESSION it is hold open during one recording session. SESSION is the default over ITEM for new projects starting with Speechrecorder version 3.0.x. We experienced recording problems with some capture devices, when they are openend for each recording: Some notebook audio chips switch the auto gain control on/off, which causes low frequency ampltitudes at the begining of the recording. Some devices show a delay from openning the device to actually streaming audio data. And we have seen devices which do not deliver any data in rare cases.

Recording target DIRECT stores the captured audio data directly to the final audio (wav) file. TEMP_RAW stores first to a temporary file and if recording has stopped converts the audio data to the final audio file. TEMP_RAW is recommended if you store your recordings to a network file system if the throughput is not sufficient to store realtime audio data.

Overwrite The Overwrite control determines whether repeated recordings of an item overwrite previous ones or are stored as versions.

Overwrite warning If set the experimenter is prompted before recordings are overwritten.

Recording mode The Recording mode control sets the default recording progress mode. (Can be overridden by the recording script)

Seamless (auto) recording Using Seamless (auto) recording the recording files of an autorecording session will have no gaps. They could be concatenated later and maybe cutted at different timestamps. (Concatenation and cutting is not yet supported by Speechrecorder). Seamless recording is only supported if Recording target is set to DIRECT.

Autoprogress to next unrecorded item If checked the recording session will jump to the next unrecorded item in autoprogress or autorecording mode.

Reset peak at start of recording If checked the peak level hold value of the level meter is reset on each recording start. Otherwise the maximum peak level hold during the recording session. Default is to reset on start of each recording.

Default prerecording delay Default pre recording delay in milliseconds. May be overridden in recording script for each item.

Default postrecording delay Default post recording delay in milliseconds. May be overridden in recording script for each item.

Force post recording phase If checked a post recording phase will be executed even if the maximum recording length is reached.

Recording URL (directory) The URL where recordings will be stored. The default is the directory ’RECS’ inside the project directory. Standalone Speechrecorder supports only the ’file:’ protocol, therefore recordings can only stored to the computers file system. You can select a directory by clicking the ’Browse...’ button. If you select a directory on a network file system you might consider to change ’Recording target’ to TEMP_RAW if you experience I/O errors. If you change the recording directory exiting recording data will not be moved to the new location.You have to do this manually.


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Figure 7Settings > Project... > Recording > Device dialog window

6.2.4 Tab Prompting
The Prompting tab contains other tabs to edit the type of start stop signal (the traffic light), select fonts, their style and size for prompt, instructions and comment texts, the location of the recording script file, default value for prompt autoplay (audio prompts), customizing the speaker window, project settings for the script item generator and playback device settings for audio prompts.

6.2.5 Tab Annotation
Speechrecoder is not an annotation tool, but it maybe helpful to store the prompt texts as annotation templates in common used annotation file formats.

Tab Persist Select the file formats here. Supported formats are:

Tab Auto annotation Select which levels/tiers to write to the annotation file:

Tab Logging Configure contents of log files and their verbosity and format here.