Default sample rate for librosa.core.load is not the native sample rate

Currently, the default sample rate is 22050 Hz when loading an audio file. In order to use the native sample rate, sr must be set to None. I often forget to set this to None when I want the native sample rate, and I have noticed many students do the same.

Have others experienced confusion over this? Should this change in a later release so that the native sample rate is the default?

[lostanlen]

Hi @NumesSanguis. Thank you for the feedback.

soundfile.read doesn’t accept a samplerate keyword for changing the sample rate at load time (and my Google-fu skills couldn’t find how to do it with soundfile at all)

To be fair, librosa does not really change the sample rate “at load time”. It loads the whole file as a numpy array at its native sample rate, and then calls librosa.resample to perform resampling of that numpy array. Calling librosa.load with sr=None simply skips the second step.

So, if librosa.load were to be deprecated, the recommended way to perform its default behavior would be:

import soundfile as sf
original_y, original_sr = sf.read("sample.wav")
y = librosa.resample(original_y, original_sr, 22050)

[lostanlen]

-1 to loadn

loadn strikes me as akin to idioms like kill -9, where you have to append something to the command so that it ends up doing what its name implies.