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Converting audio to the right format

Acme Studios have asked you to do a proof of concept to find out more about their audio files.

After exploring them briefly, you find there's a few calls but they're in the wrong file format for transcription.

As you'll be interacting with many audio files, you decide to begin by creating some helper functions.

The first one, convert_to_wav(filename) takes a file path and uses PyDub to convert it from a non-wav format to .wav format.

Once it's built, we'll use the function to convert Acme's first call, call_1.mp3, from .mp3 format to .wav.

PyDub's AudioSegment class has already been imported. Remember, to work with non-wav files, you'll need ffmpeg (docs).

This is a part of the course

“Spoken Language Processing in Python”

View Course

Exercise instructions

  • Import the filename parameter using AudioSegment's from_file().
  • Set the export format to "wav".
  • Pass the target audio file, call_1.mp3, to the function.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Create function to convert audio file to wav
def convert_to_wav(filename):
  """Takes an audio file of non .wav format and converts to .wav"""
  # Import audio file
  audio = AudioSegment.____(filename)
  
  # Create new filename
  new_filename = filename.split(".")[0] + ".wav"
  
  # Export file as .wav
  audio.export(new_filename, format=____)
  print(f"Converting {filename} to {new_filename}...")
 
# Test the function
convert_to_wav(____)
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