By adding audio functionality, we hope to make it more feasible to analyze real-world sound data directly in R. The av package is already used in R for working with video, for example to create animated graphics or sampling pictures from a camera stream for image analysis. The av package builds on the FFmpeg libav libraries, which provide a extensive, high performance implementations for streamable reading, editing, and writing of media in any format. The existing packages mostly assume small wav files, but it is unclear where to get started to analyze the complete oeuvre of Taylor Swift or a 3 hour recording of bird sounds. I got stuck on this myself when trying to use sound from youtube videos, or extract a short fragment from a long recording. However, getting your audio data into R can be tricky, because real-world audio come in all sorts of formats and codecs, with varying sampling rates, channel layouts, and so on. Audio analysis in RĬRAN has serveral cool packages for audio analysis, most notably the tuneR package, maintained by Uwe Ligges. We hope this clears an important hurdle to use R for research on speech, music, and whale mating calls.

The functionality can either be used by itself, or to prepare audio data for further analysis in R using other packages. We have added functions for reading, cutting, converting, transforming, and plotting audio data in any popular audio / video format (mp3, mkv, aac, etc).

The latest version of the rOpenSci av package includes some useful new tools for working with audio data.

Studio audio converter