Installation instructions

Soundgen is a library or "package" written in R, which is a popular general-purpose programming language. Both R and soundgen are free to install (you don't need to pay anything) and open-source, which means you can see and, if you wish, modify the code. To get soundgen running, do this:

  1. Install R.
    NB: you may already have an older version of R installed, but soundgen requires R version 4.0 or newer. The reason is that R syntax has changed over time, and recently updated packages must comply with the latest R version. If you have R 3.x, just download and install the latest version of R, then reinstall the packages you need.

  2. (optional) Install RStudio. This is not required, but RStudio is a very useful program for working with R scripts. Again, it's completely free.

  3. Install soundgen. In R, run install.packages('soundgen').
    Problems? Check your version of R, read the error messages to see which dependency (another R package that soundgen uses) failed to install. A typical R library is like a Russian doll, with the main package depending on a number of other packages, which in turn have their own dependencies, etc. Depending on your system, you may need to install some system components (outside R). Google around to find why the installation of specific packages might fail and try to keep your operating system up to date. Windows, Mac OS, and Linux should all work fine.

  4. (optional) Make sure you can play audio from R. This is not required, but working with sound in R without being able to hear the result is annoying. See demos.html for tips.

Known issues: the crucial dependency "seewave" may be tricky to install on Mac OS X. In case of issues with seewave, please refer to http://rug.mnhn.fr/seewave/

Updates

Soundgen is in active development, and a new version is typically released every 1-3 months. New versions offer new features and bug fixes, so I recommend updating your soundgen installation regularly. To do so, simply reinstall soundgen with install.packages('soundgen'). If you need a legacy version, you can always install it from CRAN. Arguably, it's also good practice to update all your R packages every month or so with update.packages(ask = FALSE).