How to install Essentia on macOS using an Anaconda environment

essentia_macos_anaconda.md

How to install Essentia on macOS using an Anaconda environment

[This is a brief note so I don't forget how to do this, and will probably be technically obsolete before long!]

Essentia is an "Open-source library and tools for audio and music analysis, description and synthesis" (https://essentia.upf.edu)

If you use Jupyter Lab / notebooks and therefore manage your Python environments using Anaconda, AND your machine is macOS, you will not be able to install Essentia out of the box. This is because:

• pip install essentia is currently Linux only
• brew install essentia (https://github.com/MTG/homebrew-essentia) is incompatible with Anaconda
• conda install essentia does not (yet) exist (MTG/essentia#777)

If you try to install Essentia from source (https://essentia.upf.edu/documentation/installing.html) using an Anaconda environment on macOS, you will find that a bug in CPython means that ./waf configure [...] fails:

• MTG/essentia#810
• ContinuumIO/anaconda-issues#1761 (comment)

However:

1. homebrew's Python does not suffer from the same issue
2. The issue above is only relevant in the configure step and not the install steps.

So! A hacky, ugly, probably broken somewhere/somehow workaround, is:

• Do ./waf configure [...] using Python installed via homebrew (brew install python) rather than Anaconda
• Then complete the rest of the installation using Anaconda's Python

Your essentia installation may end up in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/, so you then need to add this to your Anaconda path:

import sys
sys.path.append('/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/') # not permanent

Now you should be able to import essentia from your Anaconda environment.

Yes, I did say it's ugly.

Since my trials to install essentia failed many times with Homebrew, I tried to find an installation process using macports.
I run this on a Mid-2015 Mac Book Pro with Mac OSX 10.15 Catalina, it worked also on 10.13 High Sierra.

Please be aware that these operations can compromise your previous working environments or projects, so be aware and make a backup before even starting this step-by-step.
That said, I hope it will be useful to others.

1. install Mac Ports as explained in the doc and Xcode Command Line Tool

    xcode-select --install
   

2. install the required port packages:

    sudo port install pkgconfig gcc12 readline sqlite3 gdbm freetype libpng 
    sudo port install eigen3 libyaml libsamplerate libtagedit fftw-3-single
    sudo port install chromaprint
   

chromaprint dependencies include python 3.10 (as of november 2022)

3. at the end of the installation run one or both:

    sudo port select --set python python310
    sudo port select --set python3 python310
   

4. create a virtual environment and activate it:

    python3 -m venv env
    source env/bin/activate
   

5. make sure you have activated the virtual environment and install python packages necessaries for essentia,

    pip install ipython numpy matplotlib pyyaml
   

6. download essentia source code with git

    git clone https://github.com/MTG/essentia.git
   

read the essentia doc on how to configure, build and install.

7. Normally the variable VIRTUAL_ENV has been created during virtualenv installation, just in case, you can check it:

    echo $VIRTUAL_ENV
   

8. then you can start configuring:

    python3 ./waf configure --build-static --with-python --with-cpptests --with-examples --with-vamp --prefix=$VIRTUAL_ENV
   

here is the waf doc if you need any further informations and you can check this post from @xaviliz about this procedure into a virtual environment.

9. Build

    python3 ./waf
   

10. Install

    python3 ./waf install
    

if everything goes well you will see this beautiful message:

'Waf: Leaving directory `~/src/essentia/build'
'install' finished successfully (1.757s)

with these steps essentia has been installated in env/lib/python3.10/site-packages/essentia/ I don't know how to change this during the installation process without compromising it. If anyone has suggestions ...

11. once the installation is over you can test essentia in ipython

import essentia
import essentia.standard
print(dir(essentia.standard))

the output should be

['AfterMaxToBeforeMaxEnergyRatio', 'AllPass', 'AudioLoader', 'AudioOnsetsMarker', 'AudioWriter', 'AutoCorrelation', 'BFCC', 'BPF', 'BandPass', 'BandReject', 'BarkBands', 'BeatTrackerDegara', 'BeatTrackerMultiFeature', 'Beatogram', 'BeatsLoudness', 'BinaryOperator', 'BinaryOperatorStream', [...]

I had trouble with the ffmpeg libraries (libavcodec, libavformat, etc) installed via brew or ports, so i downloaded the ffmpeg 4.1 source directly from: https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/shortlog/refs/heads/release/4.1, (the most recent snapshot, commit a8a208b), then configured and build ffmpeg with shared libraries:

cd ffmpeg-a8a208b
./configure --enable-shared    
make    
make install

Then following francesco's steps above worked

Edit: I am on osx 10.15.7