You might find audio that you want to work with in youtube or tiktok videos. There are web-based tools to help you download them, and there are tools on the lab computers to get them into a format you are used to working with.
Download YouTube audio
There are many websites that will let you extract audio from YouTube videos and download as wav files. One of them is https://y2down.cc/en/youtube-wav.html and to use it, paste the YouTube link into the URL field, select the wav format, and click the blue Download button. It will show its progress and then a second blue Download button will appear below the first one. Click that button to download the wav file. Another browser tab will open and prompt you to install software. Close that window. It doesn’t affect the wav file download.
Download TikTok audio
The tools for downloading audio from TikTok are similar to the YouTube ones. One of them is https://ssstik.io/download-tiktok-mp3 and to use it, paste the TikTok link in the field that says “Just insert a link” and then click “Download”. You may need to do this more than once and you will probably need to actively avoid clicking on buttons that actually download software you don’t want.
Create/Receive Audio Recordings Remotely through WhatsApp
To start recording the participant remotely through WhatsApp, direct the participant to your WhatsApp chat. Tap and Hold to start recording or slide up the microphone icon to continue recording automatically. To cancel the recording, slide the microphone icon to the left.
When the recording is done, you will receive their audios in your WhatsApp chat. To transfer the audios to your computer from an iPhone, press and hold on the audio then choose Forward. Click on the square icon on the bottom right. Choose your favorite way of sending the audio to your computer. You can email it to yourself or use any cloud storage to transfer the audios. To transfer the audios to your computer from an Android, press and hold on the audio then choose the share icon at the top of the chat then choose your favorite way of sending the audio to your computer. The audio will be in a M4A or MP4 format. Follow the next step to convert it to wav files.
After you download the mp3 file or transfer the audios to your computer, you need to convert it to wav. You can do this by opening the mp3 file in Praat and saving it as a wav file, or you can upload the mp3 file to a lab computer (using the scp command explained on the Computers page), and then use ffmpeg or sox to convert it:
To make a stereo mp3 file into a mono wav file, use the following ffmpeg command. If for some reason you want to keep it stereo, you can leave out the -ac 1.
ffmpeg -i mytiktokaudio.mp3 -ac 1 mytiktokaudio.wav
Working with your downloaded audio
Now that you have a wav file you are interested in, you can diarize/transcribe and force align it, following the instructions on the manual pages for those steps.