running librosa & numba on raspberry pi 3

Question

I am trying to run librosa on my raspberry pi 3. After hours of searching through the internet I was finally able to install it but it still throws an error when I try to i

Answer 1

Thanks @MatthewBerryman, you got me over the hump! On the newest Raspian release (stretch) I was successful with the following after several hours of frustration of trying to get librosa installed on Raspian jessie (which my RPi3 came with). Having said this, the following procedure may also work with jessie.

First, update your system's package list and upgrade all your installed packages to their latest versions with the command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Install Python science stack:

sudo pip3 install numpy --upgrade 
sudo apt-get install python3-pandas

(Also seems to install matplotlib, scipy)

sudo apt-get install python3-sklearn

Then, install the low-level virtual machine, LLVM (per @MatthewBerryman, I used llvm 3.8 and llvmlite 0.15.0, and not the newest combination where I couldn't find the packages.) After installing llvm-3.8, a symbolic link needs to be defined before installing llvmlite.

sudo apt-get install llvm-3.8
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/llvm-config-3.8 /usr/bin/llvm-config
sudo pip3 install llvmlite==0.15.0
sudo pip3 install numba==0.32.0

Numba is 0.32.0 because if it's the newest (0.36), it will not import because of an llvm mismatch, and if it's a lower version, the librosa install will upgrade it to the newest version.

Finally, install librosa:

sudo pip3 install librosa

However, when trying to import librosa, it still throws and error, namely

ImportError: libf77blas.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Googling this error indicated this would fix it:

sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev

And it did; however, I have no idea why.

To summarize, this procedure installs librosa, and there is no error when trying this:

...$ python3
Python 3.5.3 (default, Jan 19 2017, 14:11:04)
...
>>>import librosa
>>>