Musical Informatics KV WS2025

This repository contains materials for the Winter Semester 2024 course on Musical Informatics.

For more information, see the Moodle page of the course (only for registered students).

Setup

1. Install Miniconda

To install Miniconda, follow these simple steps:

1. Download the Miniconda Installer:

   • Visit the official Miniconda download page here.

   • Choose the appropriate installer for your operating system (Windows, macOS, or Linux) and architecture (64-bit or 32-bit).

2. Install Miniconda: Follow the instructions for your OS and architecture from the official webpage.

3. Verify Installation:

   • Open a terminal (or Command Prompt for Windows).

   • Run the following command to verify that Miniconda was installed correctly:

     conda --version

   You should see the version number of Conda.

For more detailed instructions, you can refer to the official Conda documentation.

2. Clone the repository and setup the conda environment

To create setup the environment, run the following commands in the terminal:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/MusicalInformatics/miws25.git
cd miws25
conda env create -f environment.yml

The command above requires git 2.13 or later, if you have an older version of git, you can use the following command instead.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/MusicalInformatics/miws25.git
cd miws25
conda env create -f environment.yml

(you can check your git version by typing git version in the terminal).

To activate the environment in the terminal:

conda activate miws25

Known Issues Setting up the environment

Issues setting up Partitura

If your environment has issues setting up Partitura, you should install the package directly from the source:

# Activate the miws environment
conda activate miws25

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/CPJKU/partitura.git
cd partitura

# Install partitura in development mode
pip install -e .

Issues with Portaudio

If you have an error message like this, you might need to install portaudio.

issue when installing pip dependencies: src/pyaudio/device_api.c:9:10: fatal error: portaudio.h: No such file or directory
          9 | #include "portaudio.h"
            |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
      compilation terminated.
      error: command '/usr/bin/gcc' failed with exit code 1
      [end of output]
  
  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for pyaudio
error: failed-wheel-build-for-install
× Failed to build installable wheels for some pyproject.toml based projects
╰─> pyaudio
failed
CondaEnvException: Pip failed

You can do this as follows:

• Linux: sudo apt-get install portaudio19-dev
• Mac: brew install portaudio

Issues installing Fluidsynth

The python library pyfluidsynth requires a working installation of Fluidsynth. On MacOS and Linux, we recommend to use conda to install fluidsynth.

conda install -c conda-forge fluidsynth

This will install the Fluidsynth library itselt (the C-based command line tool), not the python bindings (pyfluidsynth).

Issues with Fluidsynth and pyfluidsynth on Windows

On Windows, pyfluidsynth expects fluidsynth.exe to be located in C:\tools\bin (other users have reported that it is expected in C:\tools\fluidsynth\bin). You can fix the issue by

1. Get the ZIP file for your Windows version from https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/releases/latest
2. Extract the contents to C:\tools (or wherever pyfluidsynth expects the executable to be).

Using Fluidsynth installed from Homebrew on MacOS

We recommend to install Fluidsynth from conda in a dedicated environemnt. If however, you want to use the system-wide Fluidsynth installed with homebrew, you might run into an ImportError("Couldn't find the FluidSynth library.") with pyfluidsynth. Please refer to the following link.

Lecturers

• Carlos Cancino-Chacón: carlos.cancino_chacon@jku.at

License

This repository is distributed under the MIT License.