Python 3.13 Compatibility: aifc and sunau modules removal affects librosa dependency

[osteele]

Issue Description

Python 3.13 removes the aifc and sunau modules that librosa depends on through audioread. This causes the application to fail with errors like the one reported in issue #1 (ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'audioop').

Related Issues

• Related to issue ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'audioop' #1 where a user reported errors when running on Python 3.13.1
• Upstream issue in audioread: aifc module is deprecated (and removed in Python 3.13) beetbox/audioread#144

Current Status

The pyproject.toml file already includes a Python version constraint (requires-python = ">=3.11,<3.13") to prevent installation on Python 3.13+, but we should develop a more forward-compatible solution.

Proposed Strategies

1. Wait for upstream fix: Monitor the audioread/librosa projects for updates that address Python 3.13 compatibility.

2. Fork and patch: Create a temporary fork of audioread with patches to work around the missing modules until the upstream is fixed.

3. Alternative audio processing: Investigate alternative libraries that don't rely on the removed modules:

   • pydub (already a dependency)
   • soundfile (already a dependency)
   • audioread with FFmpeg backend (may need configuration changes)

4. Conditional imports: Modify the code to conditionally use different audio processing libraries based on the Python version.

Next Steps

I suggest investigating option 3 first, as we already have pydub and soundfile as dependencies. We could potentially refactor our audio processing code to use these libraries directly instead of relying on librosa for the affected functionality.