label-snd

Easily label sound datasets!

Motivation

At my startup, we are running ML projects dealing with audio files. We need a simple yet effective sound-labelling utility and user interface. I wrote label-snd is just for this purpose, and I'm opensourcing it for use by others. It might be easily used to annotate datasets for neural text-to-speech, speech recognition or sound classification.

How to use

• From the File menu, click Select audio folder... and choose a directory containing .wav files. label-snd will automatically find all the .wav files to add into the list, starting to play the first one.
• From the File menu, click Populate choices from... and choose a .txt file which contains the choices to be added to the combo box for auto completion. Choices should be separated with a newline character. Choices might be the sentences you would expect to hear in the sound files, or they might be categories that you want to apply your sound with.
• When a sound file is playing, simply start typing in the combo box, select a choice from the filtered results or continue typing if it is not present. When your annotation is done, press ÈNTER` to continue labelling the next sound in the list.
• As you annotate sound and press ENTER, it will save them in an ljspeech-like metadata.csv file in the folder you chose in the first step. Then it will move to the next item and start playing it. You can also simply choose an item in the list with your mouse or keyboard to start playing and annotate.

Dependencies

The only dependency you need to install is wxpython. I specifically avoided using tkinter because it's not accessible to screen readers.

• pip install wxpython

Now, you can simply run label.snd.py to launch UI:

• git clone https://github.com/monatis/label-snd.git
• cd label-snd
• python label-snd.py

Or, you can produce an executable with pyinstaller if you want to do so:

• pip install pyinstaller
• pyinstaller label-snd.py
• Find the executable in dist/label-snd.

Limitations

I tested this utility on Windows, and I expect it to run on Mac, as well. However, I haven't tested it on any Linux distribution. Please file an issue if you can test it on Linux.

Roadmap

• Release the first opensource version.
• Populate choices from a chosen .txt file.
• Implement a pause/resume functionality.
• Make a Settings screen to customize certain behavior such as metadata file format, its location and the number of loops when playing a sound.
• Write an automatic text normalization algorithm for English and Turkish, and add a choce to activate or deactivate this in the settings screen.
• Write a tutorial or produce a video for several use cases.

License

GPL