Enable exporting EDF files

Describe the new feature or enhancement

There are gists available for using PyEDFlib to write EDF files, and pyedflib seems to be relatively well maintained and used.

This proposal is to enable exporting EDF files, with a warning of course that there maybe loss of data in the info object. This would also enable mne-bids to perform writing EDF file datasets, which is a RECOMMENDED file format for storage of EEG/iEEG data.

In addition, this would enable writing to an open-access file format that is heavily interfaced in EEG industry. For example, Persyst, an EEG-analytics company can only read in manufacturing formats (natus/NK/etc.) and EDF. It cannot read fiff, BrainVision, or other open source formats.

Describe your proposed implementation

This would extend https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/pull/9192 to add EDF file exporting. This would add an optional dependency with pyedflib (https://github.com/holgern/pyedflib).

Additional comments

Related issue in mne-bids: https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-bids/issues/840

[Teuniz]

Just a friendly ping to see if there was any update on getting a PyPi release?

It’s done, you can find it here: https://pypi.org/project/EDFlib-Python/

[Teuniz]

@Teuniz would you be open to doing a PyPi release of python EDFlib? One of us could help out with the changes needed for packaging, if that makes a difference. If not, I think our only option for using EDFlib is incoporating the writer into our externals/ (which we tend to be hesitant to add things to)

I’ll look into it, I have never done it before but I have a colleague with lots of Python experience. It’s just that we are entering the holiday period here, so it will take some time.