Use other tier than tier 1 in a textgrid for alignment

[Marie Hansen]

Dear MFA team and MFA users,

I have data with textgrids that are already annotated on tier 1, but I do not want to use this information but rather a new forced alignment. I could start all over and create new textgrids for each item. However, I wonder how I could change the default of the MFA (use of tier 1), so that it uses tier 2 (or any other tier) for the forced alignment. I could just add another tier, set starting and end boundaries and work with the same textgrid then. How could this be done?

I would be glad about a hint!

Best,

Marie

[Hovsep Deovletian]

Dear MFA team,

I'd also be interested in this question. I have TextGrids from field that has a lot of tiers (IPA transcription, glossing, translation, orthography, etc.). Only the orthography tier would be relevant for MFA. I would have to delete all the non-orthography tiers via some Praat script in order to make it MFA-friendly.

[Thea Knowles]

I used a little praat script to get my textgrids into the proper format, then fed those revised textgrids to MFA: https://github.com/thealk/PraatScripts/blob/master/mfa_prep/extract_tier.praat