Question

I’m having a little bit of programing and conversion trouble. I’m designing an AI to recognize notes played by instruments and need to extract the raw sound data from a wave file. My objective is to perform a FFT operation over chunks of time in the file for use by the AI. For this I need an amplitude list of the audio file, but I can’t seem to find a conversion technique that will work. The files start as MP3’s and then I convert them to wav file, but I always end up with a compressed file that spits out gibberish when I try to read it. Does anyone know how I might convert the wav file to something that would be compatible with Python’s wave module or even something that would directly convert the data into an amplitude list?

Answer 1

The default Python wave module isn’t very thorough. You might try the one included in scipy as an alternative.

Check out: Reading *.wav files in Python

If you’re going to do any numerical heavy lifting with the audio, scipy might be your best option anyway.