Trouble installing Librosa properly (sndfile.dll has not attribute named 'sf_wchar_open')

Question

I am trying to install librosa on Anaconda environment, I created a completely new and installed librosa, however I keep getting this problem, even when I re-install cffi package, audioread and others. I am not sure how I can fix this problem.

AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-d10be33b41bf> in <module>
      1 # load files with librosa as a series of floating points
----> 2 debussy, sr = librosa.load(debussy_file)

~\.conda\envs\librosa\lib\site-packages\librosa\core\audio.py in load(path, sr, mono, offset, duration, dtype, res_type)
    144 
    145     try:
--> 146         with sf.SoundFile(path) as sf_desc:
    147             sr_native = sf_desc.samplerate
    148             if offset:

~\.conda\envs\librosa\lib\site-packages\soundfile.py in __init__(self, file, mode, samplerate, channels, subtype, endian, format, closefd)
    625         self._info = _create_info_struct(file, mode, samplerate, channels,
    626                                          format, subtype, endian)
--> 627         self._file = self._open(file, mode_int, closefd)
    628         if set(mode).issuperset('r+') and self.seekable():
    629             # Move write position to 0 (like in Python file objects)

~\.conda\envs\librosa\lib\site-packages\soundfile.py in _open(self, file, mode_int, closefd)
   1168             if isinstance(file, _unicode):
   1169                 if _sys.platform == 'win32':
-> 1170                     openfunction = _snd.sf_wchar_open
   1171                 else:
   1172                     file = file.encode(_sys.getfilesystemencoding())

AttributeError: cffi library 'C:\Users\User\.conda\envs\librosa\Library\bin\sndfile.dll' has no function, constant or global variable named 'sf_wchar_open'

Answer 1

I don't know the real fix for this but deleting that code from soundfile.py solved it for me.

Just delete the if loop at line 1170 and modify it to:

if isinstance(file, _unicode):
   file = file.encode(_sys.getfilesystemencoding())

The error no longer occurs. I am looking for someone to explain why and how but for now, this works mate!

Answer 2

It looks like libsndfile 1.0.29 for conda-forge is broken as of Nov. 5, 2020. Until it has been fixed, the "solutions" as posted on GitHub are to either 1) use pip to install librosa, or 2) in conda, remove libsndfile and install soundfile from pip.

https://github.com/bastibe/SoundFile/issues/278