FLAC conversion utility not available – consider installing the FLAC command line application on Spyder/Windows 10
Question:
I’m working on a speech recognition and following the example shown in this PythonCode page on Windows 10 with Spyder 5.1.5/Anaconda (Python 3.8.10).
I installed SpeechRecognition and pydub with conda install -c conda-forge, and when I run the following script:
with sr.AudioFile(filename) as source:
audio_data = r.record(source)
text = r.recognize_google(audio_data)
print(text)
or more specifically (text = r.recognize_google(audio_data)), this error message shows up:
OSError: FLAC conversion utility not available - consider installing the FLAC command line application by running `apt-get install flac` or your operating system's equivalent
There’s a similar question but I couldn’t find the solution for the Windows environment where I don’t have apt-get install flac or brew.
Following this post, I’ve downloaded the flac.exe file and placed under C:WindowsSystem32. I can run flac on command line, but the same error shows up when I run the python script.
Does anyone know how to fix this problem?
Answers:
According to the source code it is searching for a flac without exe extension that will not work in Windows. If that fails it looks for a file with a specific name (flac-win32.exe) in module folder.
You can either try to remove the extension of the file in the System32 folder or put the file in the module folder.
viilpe’s answer is correct, and would have worked for me except for the fact that my Windows computer refused to rename the file as just ‘flac’.
I ran pretty much this exact speech recognition code in Spyder, but I kept getting the same error as alpha. I tried viilpe’s solution, but it still didn’t work for me. I don’t know if something has updated or changed between now and 2017, but even though I put the flac file in my System32 folder and renamed it flac, my computer still treated it as being named ‘flac.exe’. I had to edit the source code, changing the line:
def get_flac_converter():
"""Returns the absolute path of a FLAC converter executable, or raises an OSError if none can be found."""
flac_converter = shutil_which("flac") # check for installed version first
to:
def get_flac_converter():
"""Returns the absolute path of a FLAC converter executable, or raises an OSError if none can be found."""
flac_converter = shutil_which("flac.exe") # check for installed version first
This allowed the module to find my flac file. For reference, these are lines 1094 – 1096 in the init.py file for the speech_recognition module.
So, for anyone getting this error in 2022 or later, and renaming your flac file doesn’t work, try this.
I’m working on a speech recognition and following the example shown in this PythonCode page on Windows 10 with Spyder 5.1.5/Anaconda (Python 3.8.10).
I installed SpeechRecognition and pydub with conda install -c conda-forge, and when I run the following script:
with sr.AudioFile(filename) as source:
audio_data = r.record(source)
text = r.recognize_google(audio_data)
print(text)
or more specifically (text = r.recognize_google(audio_data)), this error message shows up:
OSError: FLAC conversion utility not available - consider installing the FLAC command line application by running `apt-get install flac` or your operating system's equivalent
There’s a similar question but I couldn’t find the solution for the Windows environment where I don’t have apt-get install flac or brew.
Following this post, I’ve downloaded the flac.exe file and placed under C:WindowsSystem32. I can run flac on command line, but the same error shows up when I run the python script.
Does anyone know how to fix this problem?
According to the source code it is searching for a flac without exe extension that will not work in Windows. If that fails it looks for a file with a specific name (flac-win32.exe) in module folder.
You can either try to remove the extension of the file in the System32 folder or put the file in the module folder.
viilpe’s answer is correct, and would have worked for me except for the fact that my Windows computer refused to rename the file as just ‘flac’.
I ran pretty much this exact speech recognition code in Spyder, but I kept getting the same error as alpha. I tried viilpe’s solution, but it still didn’t work for me. I don’t know if something has updated or changed between now and 2017, but even though I put the flac file in my System32 folder and renamed it flac, my computer still treated it as being named ‘flac.exe’. I had to edit the source code, changing the line:
def get_flac_converter():
"""Returns the absolute path of a FLAC converter executable, or raises an OSError if none can be found."""
flac_converter = shutil_which("flac") # check for installed version first
to:
def get_flac_converter():
"""Returns the absolute path of a FLAC converter executable, or raises an OSError if none can be found."""
flac_converter = shutil_which("flac.exe") # check for installed version first
This allowed the module to find my flac file. For reference, these are lines 1094 – 1096 in the init.py file for the speech_recognition module.
So, for anyone getting this error in 2022 or later, and renaming your flac file doesn’t work, try this.