librosa

A python package for music and audio analysis.

Documentation

See https://librosa.org/doc/ for a complete reference manual and introductory tutorials.

The advanced example gallery should give you a quick sense of the kinds of things that librosa can do.

Installation

The latest stable release is available on PyPI, and you can install it by saying

pip install librosa

Anaconda users can install using conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge librosa

To build librosa from source, say python setup.py build. Then, to install librosa, say python setup.py install. If all went well, you should be able to execute the demo scripts under examples/ (OS X users should follow the installation guide given below).

Alternatively, you can download or clone the repository and use pip to handle dependencies:

unzip librosa.zip
pip install -e librosa

or

git clone https://github.com/librosa/librosa.git
pip install -e librosa

By calling pip list you should see librosa now as an installed package:

librosa (0.x.x, /path/to/librosa)

Hints for the Installation

librosa uses soundfile and audioread to load audio files. Note that soundfile does not currently support MP3, which will cause librosa to fall back on the audioread library.

soundfile

If you're using conda to install librosa, then most audio coding dependencies (except MP3) will be handled automatically.

If you're using pip on a Linux environment, you may need to install libsndfile manually. Please refer to the SoundFile installation documentation for details.

audioread and MP3 support

To fuel audioread with more audio-decoding power (e.g., for reading MP3 files), you may need to install either ffmpeg or GStreamer.

Note that on some platforms, audioread needs at least one of the programs to work properly.

If you are using Anaconda, install ffmpeg by calling

conda install -c conda-forge ffmpeg

If you are not using Anaconda, here are some common commands for different operating systems:

• Linux (apt-get): apt-get install ffmpeg or apt-get install gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
• Linux (yum): yum install ffmpeg or yum install gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
• Mac: brew install ffmpeg or brew install gstreamer
• Windows: download ffmpeg binaries from this website or gstreamer binaries from this website

For GStreamer, you also need to install the Python bindings with

pip install pygobject

Discussion

Please direct non-development questions and discussion topics to our web forum at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/librosa

Citing

If you want to cite librosa in a scholarly work, there are two ways to do it.

• If you are using the library for your work, for the sake of reproducibility, please cite the version you used as indexed at Zenodo:

  

• If you wish to cite librosa for its design, motivation etc., please cite the paper published at SciPy 2015:

  McFee, Brian, Colin Raffel, Dawen Liang, Daniel PW Ellis, Matt McVicar, Eric Battenberg, and Oriol Nieto. "librosa: Audio and music signal analysis in python." In Proceedings of the 14th python in science conference, pp. 18-25. 2015.