Installation

pychoacoustics has been successfully installed and used on Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms. Installation instructions for each operating system are provided below.

Installation on Linux

For Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases there are apt repositories that can be used to install and update pychoacoustics. For other Linux distributions pychoacoustics has to be installed from source (see Section Installation from source).

Installation on Debian

Binary packages for the Debian amd64 architecture are hosted on bintray. To install pychoacoustics first install the apt-transport-https package if it is not already installed:

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

then add one of the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list depending on your Debian version: For Stretch (stable):

deb https://dl.bintray.com/sam81/hearinglab stretch main

For Jessie (oldstable):

deb https://dl.bintray.com/sam81/hearinglab jessie main

Download the key with which the repository is signed and add it to the apt keyring:

wget -qO - https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=bintray | sudo apt-key add -

Refresh the package database and install the package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pychoacoustics

Installation on Ubuntu LTS Releases

Binary packages for Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases are hosted on Launchpad. To install pychoacoustics run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:samuele-carcagno/hearinglab
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pychoacoustics

Installation on Windows and MacOS

There are experimental binary installers for Windows and MacOS on the downloads page:

http://samcarcagno.altervista.org/pychoacoustics/pychoacoustics.html

these are OK if you just want to try out pychoacoustics to see its look and feel. However, if you want to use pychoacoustics in research it’s recommended that for Windows and MacOS you install from source (see below). Producing the binaries for these OSs is time consuming, so the binary installers may be updated less often with the latest bug fixes.

Installation from source

pychoacoustics depends on Python and a handful of Python modules. There are two ways to obtain these dependencies. One is to install Python and all the dependencies “manually” (that is one by one). The other (and easier) way is to install a Python distribution that comes with a bundle of pre-installed modules. These include:

Step by step instructions to install pychoacoustics on Windows with WinPython are provided below. Although these instructions are specific to Windows the installation steps are similar on Mac OS X and Linux systems. If you get stuck at some point don’t hesitate to get in touch <sam.carcagno@gmail.com>.

Install with WinPython on Windows

Download the latest version on [WinPython](https://winpython.github.io/) and unpack it to a folder of your choice. Download the Windows source package of pychoacoustics. Open the DOS command prompt and change directory to the folder where you unpacked WinPython, which should contain the python.exe executable. For example:

cd C:\Users\audiolab\Desktop\WinPython

once you’re in the WinPython folder, you can instruct the Pyzo Python interpreter to run pychoacoustics by calling python.exe followed by the path where the pychoacoustics main file is located. For example:

python.exe "C:\Users\audiolab\Desktop\pychoacoustics-0.4.8\pychoacoustics.pyw"

Currently there is not an application launcher. There is, however, a file called pychoacoustics-launcher.bat inside the scripts folder of the source distribution of pychoacoustics that after some modifications can be used as a launcher. The content of the file is the following:

C:\Python32\python "C:\Python32\site-packages\pychoacoustics.pyw"
%1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8

The first statement C:\Python32\python is the path to the Python executable. The second statement is the path to the main file of the pychoacoustics app. You simply need to replace those two statements to reflect the Python installation on your system. Following the example above, you would change the contents of the file to:

"C:\Users\audiolab\Desktop\WinPython\python.exe" "C:\Users\audiolab\Desktop\pychoacoustics-pyside-0.4.8\pychoacoustics.pyw"
%1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8

You can place the .bat launcher wherever you want, for example on your Desktop folder. Simply double click on it, and pychoacoustics should start.

“Manual” Installation from Source

pychoacoustics depends on the installation of a handful of other Python modules:

additionally it is necessary to install one of the modules providing Python bindings to the Qt widgets toolkit. There are three parallel versions of pychoacoustics that support the major modules providing Python bindings to Qt (PyQt5, PyQt4, and PySide). You need to install only one of these modules, and use the corresponding version of pychoacoustics

these programs need to be installed manually. Once these programs are installed you can proceed with the installtion of pychoacoustics:

python3 setup.py install

you can then invoke pychoacoustics from a terminal by typing the command

pychoacoustics.pyw

There are two additional optional dependencies:

if matplotlib and pandas are installed pychoacoustics can generate graphical summaries of the results of an experimental session.

Install Python and the Dependencies manually on Windows

Please, note that you will need Python version 3 or above to run pychoacoustics.

To install the dependencies, download them from their respective websites. Make sure that you pick versions compatible with your architecture (64 or 32 bits), and compatible with you Python version.

After installing the dependencies, it is recommended to add the directory where the Python executable resides to the system PATH. In this way you can call python from a DOS shell by simply typing its name, rather than typing the full path to the Python executable.

By default python is installed in C:. The name of the Python directory depends on its version number, for example, if you installed Python version 3.2, the python directory will be C:\Python32. To add this directory to the system path go to My Computer and click Properties, then click Advanced System Settings. In the System Properties window click Environment Variables. There you will find an entry called Path. Select it and click Edit. Be careful not to remove any of the entries that are already written there because it could corrupt your system. Simply append the name of the full path of the folder where Python is installed, at the end of the other entries.

To run pychoacoustics, unpack the pychoacoustics .zip file containing the source code. Open a DOS shell, cd to the directory where you unzipped pychoacoustics and launch it with the following command:

python pychoacoustics.pyw

Currently there is not an application launcher. There is, however, a file called pychoacoustics-launcher.bat inside the scripts folder of the source distribution of pychoacoustics that after some modifications can be used as a launcher. The content of the file is the following:

C:\Python32\python "C:\Python32\site-packages\pychoacoustics.pyw"
%1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8

The first statement C:\Python32\python is the path to the Python executable. The second statement is the path to the main file of the pychoacoustics app. You simply need to replace those two statements to reflect the Python installation on your system. You can place the .bat launcher wherever you want, for example on your Desktop folder. Simply double click on it, and pychoacoustics should start.