TorchAudio 2.3.0 Release

This release is compatible with PyTorch 2.3.0 patch release. There are no new features added.

This release contains minor documentation and code quality improvements (#3734, #3748, #3757, #3759)

TorchAudio 2.2.2 Release

This release is compatible with PyTorch 2.2.2 patch release. There are no new features added.

TorchAudio 2.2.1 Release

This release is compatible with PyTorch 2.2.1 patch release. There are no new features added.

TorchAudio 2.2.0 Release

New Features

• Add path-like object support to StreamReader/Writer #3608
• Introduce trio top-level module, dedicated for core I/O operations (#3676, #3680, #3681, #3682) Please refer to https://pytorch.org/audio/2.2.0/torio.html for the details.

Bug Fixes

• #3685 Make F.vad return empty tensor for zero valued tensor input

Recipe Updates

• #3631 Fix inconsistent naming

TorchAudio 2.1.2 Release

This is a patch release, which is compatible with PyTorch 2.1.2. There are no new features added.

v2.1.1

This is a minor release, which is compatible with PyTorch 2.1.1 and includes bug fixes, improvements and documentation updates.

Bug Fixes

• Cherry-pick 2.1.1: Fix WavLM bundles (#3665)
• Cherry-pick 2.1.1: Add back compression level in i/o dispatcher backend by (#3666)

Torchaudio 2.1 Release Note

Hilights

TorchAudio v2.1 introduces the new features and backward-incompatible changes;

1. [BETA] A new API to apply filter, effects and codec
   torchaudio.io.AudioEffector can apply filters, effects and encodings to waveforms in online/offline fashion.
   You can use it as a form of augmentation.
   Please refer to https://pytorch.org/audio/2.1/tutorials/effector_tutorial.html for the examples.
2. [BETA] Tools for forced alignment
   New functions and a pre-trained model for forced alignment were added.
   torchaudio.functional.forced_align computes alignment from an emission and torchaudio.pipelines.MMS_FA provides access to the model trained for multilingual forced alignment in MMS: Scaling Speech Technology to 1000+ languages project.
   Please refer to https://pytorch.org/audio/2.1/tutorials/ctc_forced_alignment_api_tutorial.html for the usage of forced_align function, and https://pytorch.org/audio/2.1/tutorials/forced_alignment_for_multilingual_data_tutorial.html for how one can use MMS_FA to align transcript in multiple languages.
3. [BETA] TorchAudio-Squim : Models for reference-free speech assessment
   Model architectures and pre-trained models from the paper TorchAudio-Squim: Reference-less Speech Quality and Intelligibility measures in TorchAudio were added.
   You can use torchaudio.pipelines.SQUIM_SUBJECTIVE and torchaudio.pipelines.SQUIM_OBJECTIVE models to estimate the various speech quality and intelligibility metrics. This is helpful when evaluating the quality of speech generation models, such as TTS.
   Please refer to https://pytorch.org/audio/2.1/tutorials/squim_tutorial.html for the detail.
4. [BETA] CUDA-based CTC decoder
   torchaudio.models.decoder.CUCTCDecoder takes emission stored in CUDA memory and performs CTC beam search on it in CUDA device. The beam search is fast. It eliminates the need to move data from CUDA device to CPU when performing automatic speech recognition. With PyTorch's CUDA support, it is now possible to perform the entire speech recognition pipeline in CUDA.
   Please refer to https://pytorch.org/audio/2.1/tutorials/asr_inference_with_cuda_ctc_decoder_tutorial.html for the detail.
5. [Prototype] Utilities for AI music generation
   We are working to add utilities that are relevant to music AI. Since the last release, the following APIs were added to the prototype.
   Please refer to respective documentation for the usage.
   • torchaudio.prototype.chroma_filterbank
   • torchaudio.prototype.transforms.ChromaScale
   • torchaudio.prototype.transforms.ChromaSpectrogram
   • torchaudio.prototype.pipelines.VGGISH
6. New recipes for training models.
   Recipes for Audio-visual ASR, multi-channel DNN beamforming and TCPGen context-biasing were added.
   Please refer to the recipes
   • https://github.com/pytorch/audio/tree/release/2.1/examples/avsr
   • https://github.com/pytorch/audio/tree/release/2.1/examples/dnn_beamformer
   • https://github.com/pytorch/audio/tree/release/2.1/examples/asr/librispeech_conformer_rnnt_biasing
7. Update to FFmpeg support
   The version of supported FFmpeg libraries was updated.
   TorchAudio v2.1 works with FFmpeg 6, 5 and 4.4. The support for 4.3, 4.2 and 4.1 are dropped.
   Please refer to https://pytorch.org/audio/2.1/installation.html#optional-dependencies for the detail of the new FFmpeg integration mechanism.
8. Update to libsox integration
   TorchAudio now depends on libsox installed separately from torchaudio. Sox I/O backend no longer supports file-like object. (This is supported by FFmpeg backend and soundfile)
   Please refer to https://pytorch.org/audio/2.1/installation.html#optional-dependencies for the detail.

New Features

I/O

• Support overwriting PTS in torchaudio.io.StreamWriter (#3135)
• Include format information after filter torchaudio.io.StreamReader.get_out_stream_info (#3155)
• Support CUDA frame in torchaudio.io.StreamReader filter graph (#3183, #3479)
• Support YUV444P in GPU decoder (#3199)
• Add additional filter graph processing to torchaudio.io.StreamWriter (#3194)
• Cache and reuse HW device context in GPU decoder (#3178)
• Cache and reuse HW device context in GPU encoder (#3215)
• Support changing the number of channels in torchaudio.io.StreamReader (#3216)
• Support encode spec change in torchaudio.io.StreamWriter (#3207)
• Support encode options such as compression rate and bit rate (#3179, #3203, #3224)
• Add 420p10le support to torchaudio.io.StreamReader CPU decoder (#3332)
• Support multiple FFmpeg versions (#3464, #3476)
• Support writing opus and mp3 with soundfile (#3554)
• Add switch to disable sox integration and ffmpeg integration at runtime (#3500)

Ops

• Add torchaudio.io.AudioEffector (#3163, #3372, #3374)
• Add torchaudio.transforms.SpecAugment (#3309, #3314)
• Add torchaudio.functional.forced_align (#3348, #3355, #3533, #3536, #3354, #3365, #3433, #3357)
• Add torchaudio.functional.merge_tokens (#3535, #3614)
• Add torchaudio.functional.frechet_distance (#3545)

Models

• Add torchaudio.models.SquimObjective for speech enhancement (#3042, 3087, #3512)
• Add torchaudio.models.SquimSubjective for speech enhancement (#3189)
• Add torchaudio.models.decoder.CUCTCDecoder (#3096)

Pipelines

• Add torchaudio.pipelines.SquimObjectiveBundle for speech enhancement (#3103)
• Add torchaudio.pipelines.SquimSubjectiveBundle for speech enhancement (#3197)
• Add torchaudio.pipelines.MMS_FA Bundle for forced alignment (#3521, #3538)

Tutorials

• Add tutorial for torchaudio.io.AudioEffector (#3226)
• Add tutorials for CTC forced alignment API (#3356, #3443, #3529, #3534, #3542, #3546, #3566)
• Add tutorial for torchaudio.models.decoder.CUCTCDecoder (#3297)
• Add tutorial for real-time av-asr (#3511)
• Add tutorial for TorchAudio-SQUIM pipelines (#3279, #3313)
• Split HW acceleration tutorial into nvdec/nvenc tutorials (#3483, #3478)

Recipe

• Add TCPGen context-biasing Conformer RNN-T (#2890)
• Add AV-ASR recipe (#3278, #3421, #3441, #3489, #3493, #3498, #3492, #3532)
• Add multi-channel DNN beamforming training recipe (#3036)

Backward-incompatible changes

Third-party libraries

In this release, the following third party libraries are removed from TorchAudio binary distributions. TorchAudio now search and link these libraries at runtime. Please install them to use the corresponding APIs.

SoX

libsox is used for various audio I/O, filtering operations.

Pre-built binaries are avaialble via package managers, such as conda, apt and brew. Please refer to the respective documetation.

The APIs affected include;

• torchaudio.load ("sox" backend)
• torchaudio.info ("sox" backend)
• torchaudio.save ("sox" backend)
• torchaudio.sox_effects.apply_effects_tensor
• torchaudio.sox_effects.apply_effects_file
• torchaudio.functional.apply_codec (also deprecated, see below)

Changes related to the removal: #3232, #3246, #3497, #3035

Flashlight Text

flashlight-text is the core of CTC decoder.

Pre-built packages are available on PyPI. Please refer to https://github.com/flashlight/text for the detail.

The APIs affected include;

• torchaudio.models.decoder.CTCDecoder

Changes related to the removal: #3232, #3246, #3236, #3339

Kaldi

A custom built libkaldi was used to implement torchaudio.functional.compute_kaldi_pitch. This function, along with libkaldi integration, is removed in this release. There is no replcement.

Changes related to the removal: #3368, #3403

I/O

• Switch to the backend dispatcher (#3241)

To make I/O operations more flexible, TorchAudio introduced the backend dispatcher in v2.0, and users could opt-in to use the dispatcher.
In this release, the backend dispatcher becomes the default mechanism for selecting the I/O backend.

You can pass backend argument to torchaudio.info, torchaudio.load and torchaudio.save function to select I/O backend library per-call basis. (If it is omitted, an available backend is automatically selected.)

If you want to use the global backend mechanism, you can set the environment variable, TORCHAUDIO_USE_BACKEND_DISPATCHER=0.
Please note, however, that this the global backend mechanism is deprecated and is going to be removed in the next release.

Please see #2950 for the detail of migration work.

• Remove Tensor binding from StreamReader (#3093, #3272)

torchaudio.io.StreamReader accepted a byte-string wrapped in 1D torch.Tensor object. This is no longer supported.
Please wrap the underlying data with io.BytesIO instead.

• Make I/O optional arguments kw-only (#3208, #3227)

The optional arguments of add_[audio|video]_stream methods of torchaudio.io.StreamReader and torchaudio.io.StreamWriter are now keyword-only arguments.

• Drop the support of FFmpeg < 4.1 (#3561, 3557)

Previously TorchAudio supported FFmpeg 4 (>=4.1, <=4.4). In this release, TorchAudio supports FFmpeg 4, 5 and 6 (>=4.4, <7). With this change, support for FFmpeg 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 are dropped.

Ops

• Use named file in torchaudio.functional.apply_codec (#3397)

In previous versions, TorchAudio shipped custom built libsox, so that it can perform in-memory decoding and encoding.
Now, in-memory decoding and encoding are handled by FFmpeg binding, and with the switch to dynamic libsox linking, torchaudio.functional.apply_codec no longer process audio in in-memory fashion. Instead it writes to temporary file.
For in-memory processing, please use torchaudio.io.AudioEffector.

• Switch to lstsq when solving InverseMelScale (#3280)

Previously, torchaudio.transform.InverseMelScale ran SGD optimizer to find the inverse of mel-scale transfo...

v2.0.2

TorchAudio 2.0.2 Release Note

This is a minor release, which is compatible with PyTorch 2.0.1 and includes bug fixes, improvements and documentation updates. There is no new feature added.

Bug fix

• #3239 Properly set #samples passed to encoder (#3204)
• #3238 Fix virtual function issue with CTC decoder (#3230)
• #3245 Fix path-like object support in FFmpeg dispatcher (#3243, #3248)
• #3261 Use scaled_dot_product_attention in Wav2vec2/HuBERT's SelfAttention (#3253)
• #3264 Use scaled_dot_product_attention in WavLM attention (#3252, #3265)

Full Changelog: v2.0.1...v2.0.2

Torchaudio 2.0 Release Note

Highlights

TorchAudio 2.0 release includes:

• Data augmentation operators, e.g. convolution, additive noise, speed perturbation
• WavLM and XLS-R models and pre-trained pipelines
• Backend dispatcher powering revised info, load, save functions
• Dropped support of Python 3.7
• Added Python 3.11 support

[Beta] Data augmentation operators

The release adds several data augmentation operators under torchaudio.functional and torchaudio.transforms:

• torchaudio.functional.add_noise
• torchaudio.functional.convolve
• torchaudio.functional.deemphasis
• torchaudio.functional.fftconvolve
• torchaudio.functional.preemphasis
• torchaudio.functional.speed
• torchaudio.transforms.AddNoise
• torchaudio.transforms.Convolve
• torchaudio.transforms.Deemphasis
• torchaudio.transforms.FFTConvolve
• torchaudio.transforms.Preemphasis
• torchaudio.transforms.Speed
• torchaudio.transforms.SpeedPerturbation

The operators can be used to synthetically diversify training data to improve the generalizability of downstream models.

For usage details, please refer to the documentation for torchaudio.functional and torchaudio.transforms, and tutorial “Audio Data Augmentation”.

[Beta] WavLM and XLS-R models and pre-trained pipelines

The release adds two self-supervised learning models for speech and audio.

• WavLM that is robust to noise and reverberation.
• XLS-R that is trained on cross-lingual datasets.

Besides the model architectures, torchaudio also supports corresponding pre-trained pipelines:

• torchaudio.pipelines.WAVLM_BASE
• torchaudio.pipelines.WAVLM_BASE_PLUS
• torchaudio.pipelines.WAVLM_LARGE
• torchaudio.pipelines.WAV2VEC_XLSR_300M
• torchaudio.pipelines.WAV2VEC_XLSR_1B
• torchaudio.pipelines.WAV2VEC_XLSR_2B

For usage details, please refer to factory function and pre-trained pipelines documentation.

Backend dispatcher

Release 2.0 introduces new versions of I/O functions torchaudio.info, torchaudio.load and torchaudio.save, backed by a dispatcher that allows for selecting one of backends FFmpeg, SoX, and SoundFile to use, subject to library availability. Users can enable the new logic in Release 2.0 by setting the environment variable TORCHAUDIO_USE_BACKEND_DISPATCHER=1; the new logic will be enabled by default in Release 2.1.

# Fetch metadata using FFmpeg
metadata = torchaudio.info("test.wav", backend="ffmpeg")

# Load audio (with no backend parameter value provided, function prioritizes using FFmpeg if it is available)
waveform, rate = torchaudio.load("test.wav")

# Write audio using SoX
torchaudio.save("out.wav", waveform, rate, backend="sox")

Please see the documentation for torchaudio for more details.

Backward-incompatible changes

• Dropped Python 3.7 support (#3020)
  Following the upstream PyTorch (pytorch/pytorch#93155), the support for Python 3.7 has been dropped.

• Default to "precise" seek in torchaudio.io.StreamReader.seek (#2737, #2841, #2915, #2916, #2970)
  Previously, the StreamReader.seek method seeked into a key frame closest to the given time stamp. A new option mode has been added which can switch the behavior to seeking into any type of frame, including non-key frames, that is closest to the given timestamp, and this behavior is now default.

• Removed deprecated/unused/undocumented functions from datasets.utils (#2926, #2927)
  The following functions are removed from datasets.utils

  • stream_url
  • download_url
  • validate_file
  • extract_archive.

Deprecations

Ops

• Deprecated 'onesided' init param for MelSpectrogram (#2797, #2799)
  torchaudio.transforms.MelSpectrogram assumes the onesided argument to be always True. The forward path fails if its value is False. Therefore this argument is deprecated. Users specifying this argument should stop specifying it.

• Deprecated "sinc_interpolation" and "kaiser_window" option value in favor of "sinc_interp_hann" and "sinc_interp_kaiser" (#2922)
  The valid values of resampling_method argument of resampling operations (torchaudio.transforms.Resample and torchaudio.functional.resample) are changed. "kaiser_window" is now "sinc_interp_kaiser" and "sinc_interpolation" is "sinc_interp_hann". The old values will continue to work, but users are encouraged to update their code.
  For the reason behind of this change, please refer #2891.

• Deprecated sox initialization/shutdown public API functions (#3010)
  torchaudio.sox_effects.init_sox_effects and torchaudio.sox_effects.shutdown_sox_effects are deprecated. They were required to use libsox-related features, but are called automatically since v0.6, and the initialization/shutdown mechanism have been moved elsewhere. These functions are now no-op. Users can simply remove the call to these functions.

Models

• Deprecated static binding of Flashlight-text based CTC decoder (#3055, #3089)
  Since v0.12, TorchAudio binary distributions included the CTC decoder based on flashlight-text project. In a future release, TorchAudio will switch to dynamic binding of underlying CTC decoder implementation, and stop shipping the core CTC decoder implementations. Users who would like to use the CTC decoder need to separately install the CTC decoder from the upstream flashlight-text project. Other functionalities of TorchAudio will continue to work without flashlight-text.
  Note: The API and numerical behavior does not change.
  For more detail, please refer #3088.

I/O

• Deprecated file-like object support in sox_io (#3033)
  As a preparation to switch to dynamically bound libsox, file-like object support in sox_io backend has been deprecated. It will be removed in 2.1 release in favor of the dispatcher. This deprecation affects the following functionalities.
  • I/O: torchaudio.load, torchaudio.info and torchaudio.save.
  • Effects: torchaudio.sox_effects.apply_effects_file and torchaudio.functional.apply_codec.
    For I/O, to continue using file-like objects, please use the new dispatcher mechanism.
    For effects, replacement functions will be added in the next release.
• Deprecated the use of Tensor as a container for byte string in StreamReader (#3086)
  torchaudio.io.StreamReader supports decoding media from byte strings contained in 1D tensors of torch.uint8 type. Using torch.Tensor type as a container for byte string is now deprecated. To pass byte strings, please wrap the string with io.BytesIO.

  Deprecated	Migration
  data = b"..." src = torch.frombuffer(data, dtype=torch.uint8) StreamReader(src)	data = b"..." src = io.BytesIO(data) StreamReader(src)

Bug Fixes

Ops

• Fixed contiguous error when backpropagating through torchaudio.functional.lfilter (#3080)

Pipelines

• Added layer normalization to wav2vec2 large+ pretrained models (#2873)
  In self-supervised learning models such as Wav2Vec 2.0, HuBERT, or WavLM, layer normalization should be applied to waveforms if the convolutional feature extraction module uses layer normalization and is trained on a large-scale dataset. After adding layer normalization to those affected models, the Word Error Rate is significantly reduced.

Without the change in #2873, the WER results are:

Model	dev-clean	dev-other	test-clean	test-other
WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_10M	10.59	15.62	9.58	16.33
WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_100H	2.80	6.01	2.82	6.34
WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H	2.36	4.43	2.41	4.96
HUBERT_ASR_LARGE	1.85	3.46	2.09	3.89
HUBERT_ASR_XLARGE	2.21	3.40	2.26	4.05

After applying layer normalization, the updated WER results are:
| Model | dev-clean | dev-other | test-clean | test-other |
|:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

TorchAudio 0.13.1 Release Note

This is a minor release, which is compatible with PyTorch 1.13.1 and includes bug fixes, improvements and documentation updates. There is no new feature added.

Bug Fix

IO

• Make buffer size configurable in ffmpeg file object operations and set size in backend (#2810)
• Fix issue with the missing video frame in StreamWriter (#2789)
• Fix decimal FPS handling StreamWriter (#2831)
• Fix wrong frame allocation in StreamWriter (#2905)
• Fix duplicated memory allocation in StreamWriter (#2906)

Model

• Fix HuBERT model initialization (#2846, #2886)

Recipe

• Fix issues in HuBERT fine-tuning recipe (#2851)
• Fix automatic mixed precision in HuBERT pre-training recipe (#2854)