Alternative to reading m4a files

I am currently having another go at Julia and decided to do a small project working on audio data. Currently running into the situation of not being able to read m4a files. These are coming from my OSX setup and I am doing all my julia stuff on my ml linux box. I understand libsndfile (@ssfrr) will not read these so I am wondering what is the best format to have these saved in python? I know I read these files python and export them into different formats. Is wav my best approach? I’d rather use a compressed format but still being able to load it as audio-esque files, as I would want to perform MFCC, etc. I guess I am aiming to as much audio manipulation as possible in Julia.

For starters, I was currently thinking of saving them all as wav 22khz stereo files and loading these up in Julia, anyone else have other suggestions? :slight_smile:

I’ve used GitHub - dancasimiro/WAV.jl: Julia package for working with WAV files successfully in the past, but I’d be curious to hear if other people have had success with compressed audio.

For most of my audio analysis work I use FLAC files because they’re compressed but lossless. They’re supported by LibSndFile.jl.

There’s a list if supported file types here:

If you want loss compression Ogg Vorbis is a good option.

3 Likes