Librosa tutorial

In this tutorial, my goal is to get you set up to use librosa for audio and music analysis. This tutorial will be interactive, and it will be best if you follow along on your own machine. Feel free to bring along some of your own music to analyze!

We'll be using Jupyter notebooks and the Anaconda Python environment with Python version 3.5. It will be best if you follow the instructions below before attending the tutorial, but installation disks will also be provided in case anything goes wrong or you require assistance.

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Installing the dependencies

Before getting started with librosa, it's important to have a working environment with all dependencies satisfied. For this, we recommend using the Anaconda distribution of Python 3.5. (Older versions of Python are supported as well.)

Once your Anaconda environment is installed and activated, you can install librosa through conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge librosa

Audio codecs

Librosa requires a few additional packages to load audio data encoded in various formats (e.g., mp3, ogg, flac, m4a). The two main libraries used by librosa are ffmpeg and gstreamer. Both are optional, but you must install at least one package. Audio codec libraries are packaged differently on different platforms.

• On Linux, ffmpeg is available through conda-forge and is installed automatically when librosa is installed through conda-forge. GStreamer can be installed through your Linux distribution's package manager (e.g., apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-0 on Debian/Ubuntu).

• On OSX, ffmpeg is available through conda-forge and is installed automatically when librosa is installed through conda-forge. GStreamer can be installed by brew install gstreamer or by downloading directly from the gstreamer downloads page.

• On Windows, ffmpeg must be installed separately from the ffmpeg downloads page.

For all operating systems, if you're using gstreamer, you will need to install PyGObject through pip:

pip install PyGObject

Jupyter

The tutorial materials in this repository are provided in the form of Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter can be installed by the following command:

conda install jupyter