Installing HTK

Some tips for installing HTK

Installing HTK on your own computer

We really do not recommend installing HTK yourself unless you’re familiar with compiling code. It’s best to use the lab computers (remote or in person) or ssh. The code is quite old and not maintained, so you’re likely to run into dependency issues. The install instructions haven’t been tested recently.

If you do want to try installing HTK on your own computer, here are some instructions:

Those gists also include info on how to download the assignment data. I was only able to test these on somewhat older machines, so there’s a high probability that new machines like the Mac M1 will run into problem.

Downloading the scripts and data to your computer

In general, you can download the data from the PPLS AT lab servers using rsync as follows. You could also use a file transfer app like FileZilla or WinSCP, you just need to navigate to the corresponding directories.

You don’t need to download any data if you are working on the PPLS AT lab machines (in-person or remote!)

On your own computer, navigate to the directory you want to download it to. The following assumes you’ll just use the same directory structure as the instructions from the PPLS AT lab remote desktops (replacing YOUR_UUN with your actual UUN:

mkdir -p ~/Documents/sp 
rsync -avz YOUR_UUN@scp1.ppls.ed.ac.uk:/Volumes/Network/courses/sp/digit_recogniser ~/Documents/sp

This will copy the scripts in the digit_recogniser directory on the AT lab servers to the directory Documents/sp in your home directory (remember ~ is a shortcut for your home directory in unix command line).

Now let’s get the data directory (e.g. features and labels from recordings):

mkdir -p ~/Documents/sp 
rsync --exclude 'wav' -avz YOUR_UUN@scp1.ppls.ed.ac.uk:/Volumes/Network/courses/sp/data ~/Documents/sp

This will exclude the `wav` directory which as you might expect includes the recordings that features were extracted from. It’s around 4 GB. If you want to download this data too, you can just remove the `–exclude ‘wav’` flag.

Assuming you downloaded the data into ~/Documents/sp, you can go to the directory with the digit recognizer scripts from your home directory:

cd ~/Documents/sp/digit_recogniser

To go to the directory with the data from your home directory:

cd ~/Documents/sp/data

After you have completed the assignment, you must delete any data that you downloaded. You only have permission to use it for the Speech Processing course, and no other purpose.