English acoustic model for previous MFA version (before recent update)

[Marie Hansen]

Dear MFA crowd/ MFA support,

we're having trouble using the updated version of the MFA with English and French data in our lab. It turned out that the segment alignments still work for the French data when using the old version (for the new version, there is an error related to the dictionary, I've seen questions regarding the same error here before, so no need to discuss it here again).

We're definitely keeping up with solutions for errors with the updated version. However, for now, we would like to try the older version of the MFA (previous to the last update) for our English data. We did not use the MFA with English data so far and wanted to download a dictionary and acoustic model for it. Using the command "MFA download acoustic English" apparently leads to a download of an acoustic model that might only work with the updated version - we're getting an error with this acoustic model, it is not recognized as a zip-file in the alignment process. Same goes for the dictionary - when downloading it by means of the respective command, we are getting a file that is not a txt and cannot be used with the old version of the MFA. We found a txt file for an English dictionary from Prosodylab but we are still lacking an acoustic model for English that we can use! By the way, the link here does not work:  https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/en/stable/pretrained_models.html Hence, my question (or kind request):

Could someone please provide us with an acoustic model that has been working with the old version of the MFA, previous to the recent update??? This would be much appreciated!

Best,
Marie

[Marie Hansen]

Ah, by the way - the issue with the English data and the new MFA version is: Everything works fine, no errors occur during the alignment, there is an output folder created BUT no output files are generated.

[michael.e...@gmail.com]

Here's the link for the english acoustic model: https://github.com/MontrealCorpusTools/mfa-models/blob/main/acoustic/english.zip?raw=true, it hasn't been updated as part of 2.0 (all the links on https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/models/acoustic.html point to 1.0 models, other than english_ipa).  The root of the model not being recognized might be using capitalized "English" rather than "english", I think it could download a 404 web page in place of the zip file, I'll look into this and add a check in newer versions.

For the issue with the newer version, could you give some more details on it?  What version were you using? Did you try rerunning it with `--clean` (Different version using the same temporary directory can have issues)? Can you attach the align.log file in the temporary directory for the run?

Thanks!