The problem with installing pyaudio

Question

I want to install pyaudio on my RPi 4 that has 64bit Bullseye 11.2.

According to https://makersportal.com/blog/2018/8/23/recording-audio-on-the-raspberry-pi-with-python-and-a-usb-microphone I should do

sudo apt install libportaudio0 libportaudio2 libportaudiocpp0 portaudio19-dev

however I get

E: Unable to locate package libportaudio0

pyaudio actually recognises my I2S microphone

snd_rpi_i2s_card: simple-card_codec_link snd-soc-dummy-dai-0 (hw:1,0)

but reading sound from it goes nowhere.

I know this worked on 32-bit rRspberry Pi OS. Is this a 64-bit OS problem? How to solve it?

Answer 1

The first problem is that libportaudio is not available in the 64-bit RpiOS.

The deeper problem is that the advice you have been following is perhaps not very good -- I won't say definitely, because I'm not a user of pyaudio, but it smells like it a bit. My major reason for suspecting this is that there is a python-pyaudio package available in 64 (and 32) -bit, and has been at least since buster and most likely for a long time before that.

Yet the article you link does not mention this even once, which implies the author was not aware and did not have a good understanding of linux package management systems. The python module is pyaudio, so if it is available in the distro, very likely that is in the package name, and in fact there is a simple logic that can be observed in python package names such that we might assume this package is most likely called python-pyaudio. But let's just search for pyaudio first:

> apt search pyaudio
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
python-pyaudio/oldstable 0.2.11-1+b2 arm64
  Python bindings for PortAudio v19

python-pyaudio-doc/oldstable,oldstable 0.2.11-1 all
  Documentation for Python bindings for PortAudio v19

python3-pyaudio/oldstable 0.2.11-1+b2 arm64
  Python3 bindings for PortAudio v19

There are a couple more packages in the list returned that I have left off. It is interesting that these are in oldstable and not the stable; this is a buster system so it means that package has been there since stretch, which is going back 4-5 years.¹ The version listed here is explicitly for "PortAudio v19", which if we dig into their website a bit reveals that this is the current version.

It is important to understand that if the package manager installs something in its default mode, that software is ready to use. A major purpose of a package management system is that it manages dependencies for you.

There is both a python and python3 package available. Here's more about the latter:

> apt show python3-pyaudio
Package: python3-pyaudio
Version: 0.2.11-1+b2
Priority: optional
Section: python
Source: python-pyaudio (0.2.11-1)
Maintainer: Hubert Pham <[email protected]>
Installed-Size: 148 kB
Provides: python3.6-pyaudio, python3.7-pyaudio
Depends: python3 (<< 3.8), python3 (>= 3.6~), python3:any (>= 3.3.2-2~), libc6 (>= 2.17), libportaudio2 (>= 19+svn20101113)
Suggests: python-pyaudio-doc (>= 0.2.11)
Homepage: https://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/
Download-Size: 25.3 kB
APT-Sources: http://deb.debian.org/debian buster/main arm64 Packages
Description: Python3 bindings for PortAudio v19

There are dependencies there including libportaudio2, which presumably replaced libportaudio0. Again: You do not have to go through the list of dependencies and install them all one at a time manually. By installing python[3]-pyaudio, those dependencies will be included.

So, what you should have tried first was just:

sudo apt install python3-pyaudio

Presuming you want the python3 version. I can't promise this does work, but it is not hard to try.

---

1. Meaning it was there when that article was written. This is actually good, since it implies that all the rigmarole there was not because the pyaudio package was broken but because the author was not aware it existed.

Answer 2

libportaudio0, libportaudio2, libportaudiocpp0 are/were essentially just dependencies on the portaudio19-dev package. But over time libportaudio0 has stopped being a dependency and is no longer needed (source: http://packages.debian.org/bullseye/portaudio19-dev)

Also, since installing the portaudio19-dev package automatically installs the dependencies, one only needs to run

sudo apt install portaudio19-dev

If one just runs this command, everything should work normally.