A Complete Guide to Audio Datasets

Introduction

🤗 Datasets is an open-source library for downloading and preparing datasets from all domains. Its minimalistic API allows users to download and prepare datasets in just one line of Python code, with a suite of functions that enable efficient pre-processing. The number of datasets available is unparalleled, with all the most popular machine learning datasets available to download.

Not only this, but 🤗 Datasets comes prepared with multiple audio-specific features that make working with audio datasets easy for researchers and practitioners alike. In this blog, we'll demonstrate these features, showcasing why 🤗 Datasets is the go-to place for downloading and preparing audio datasets.

Contents

1. The Hub
2. Load an Audio Dataset
3. Easy to Load, Easy to Process
4. Streaming Mode: The Silver Bullet
5. A Tour of Audio Datasets on the Hub
6. Closing Remarks

The Hub

The Hugging Face Hub is a platform for hosting models, datasets and demos, all open source and publicly available. It is home to a growing collection of audio datasets that span a variety of domains, tasks and languages. Through tight integrations with 🤗 Datasets, all the datasets on the Hub can be downloaded in one line of code.

Let's head to the Hub and filter the datasets by task:

• Speech Recognition Datasets on the Hub
• Audio Classification Datasets on the Hub

At the time of writing, there are 77 speech recognition datasets and 28 audio classification datasets on the Hub, with these numbers ever-increasing. You can select any one of these datasets to suit your needs. Let's check out the first speech recognition result. Clicking on common_voice brings up the dataset card:

Load an Audio Dataset

Let's take the example of loading the GigaSpeech dataset from Speech Colab. GigaSpeech is a relatively recent speech recognition dataset for benchmarking academic speech systems and is one of many audio datasets available on the Hugging Face Hub.

Print Output:

print(gigaspeech["train"])

Print Output:

Print Output:

Print Output: