1. Downloading the Macintosh System 8/9 edition

To download the last version of the MacOS 8/9 edition of Praat, which runs on System 8.5 to 9.2, click on the following archive:

praat4501_mac9.sit (28 October 2006; 1.3 MB)

(the System 7 edition is praat4223_mac7.sit, of 17 November 2004; use the MacOS X edition if you have MacOS X)

2. Unpacking the archive

To expand and unpack the .sit file, drop it on StuffIt Expander version 5.0 or higher (if your browser does not do this automatically for you). This will give you the program Praat. You can put it anywhere on your hard disk.

3. How to start

To start up the Praat program, just double-click it. If you use Praat for the first time, choose Intro from the Help menu.

4. Phonetic symbols

For best results with phonetic characters, you should also install the SIL Doulos IPA fonts (1993/1996 version), which were created by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. To install, first download the following archive:

silipa93.sit

Unpack the .sit file, if your web browser has not already done that. This will give you a folder called SIL IPA93 Fonts. When you open this folder, you will see three TrueType fonts, namely SILDoulos IPA93.fam™, SILManuscript IPA93.fam™, and SILSophia IPA93.fam™. Drag these three fonts to the Fonts directory of your System Folder.

If you do not install these fonts, Praat has to fall back on its own built-in one-size-only 24-point phonetic symbols, which will look rather large on your screen and unacceptably small on your non-PostScript printer. Printing on a PostScript printer (directly or by including EPS files in your word processor) will succeed even if you have not installed the font, since the Praat program contains a built-in version of the TeX XIPA font for PostScript.

5. Tuning Praat to your Macintosh (System 8 or 9)

As a rule of thumb, you could give Praat one third of your computer's memory. The System 8/9 edition comes with a "preferred memory" of 20 megabytes, which is appropriate for a machine with 64 MB RAM. On an older PowerBook with 16 MB RAM, you may want to set Praat's memory down to 5 megabytes (using File/Info in the Finder); if you have 256 megabytes of RAM, consider allocating 80 MB or more to Praat. More memory means you will be able to draw larger spectrograms etc.

Sounds are usually recorded into the memory area outside the applications (the "Largest unused block" reported with "About this computer" in the Finder). You can maximize this area by quitting some applications other than Praat.