alp-data

alp-data (Animal Language Processing data) gives you unified access to dozens of bioacoustic datasets, including recordings from birds, marine mammals, primates, insects, anurans, and multi-taxon benchmarks. Every built-in dataset shares a common Dataset interface, with streaming, configurable transforms, and consistent loading regardless of source format.

Why alp-data

Bioacoustic recordings live in many places: Zenodo, OSF, GBIF, institutional repositories. Each dataset arrives with its own format, manifest schema, audio organization, sampling rate, and licensing posture. Researchers wanting to listen across datasets first have to write a custom loader per dataset, then a custom mixer for combining them.

alp-data removes that scaffolding. Every built-in dataset surfaces the same interface (for sample in ds, ds[i], len(ds)), with audio and sample_rate keys returned for every sample. Dataset-specific keys carry labels, annotations, and other metadata. Sample-rate harmonization, label derivation, and split-aware loading are wired in.

You can stand up a multi-dataset benchmark, compare models across taxa, or stream species-specific audio for transfer learning without first becoming a data-engineering specialist.

What's included

alp-data ships with 35+ built-in datasets across:

• Birds — large benchmarks including BirdSet (6,800+ training hours, 10,000 species) and WABAD (1,192 species, 72 sites); aggregator corpora like Xeno-Canto; and site- or species-specific recordings spanning arctic species, Hawaiian soundscapes, the Powdermill dawn chorus, and individual-ID datasets for chiffchaff, little owl, and tree pipit.
• Marine mammals — the Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database (~13,700 clips across ~50 cetacean and pinniped species), DCLDE 2026 killer whale annotations, dolphin whistle and click corpora
• Primates — gelada vocal sequences, gibbon solos, infant marmoset vocalizations, and macaque coo calls.
• Insects, anurans, and other mammals — InsectSet459 (459 Orthoptera and Cicadidae species), AnuraSetStrong (42 frog species, 27 hours of expert annotations), and giant otter vocalization types.
• Multi-taxon benchmarks and aggregators — BEANS and BeansZero (the canonical bioacoustic and zero-shot benchmarks), AnimalSpeak (1M+ audio–caption pairs), AnimalSoundArchive, iNaturalist audio, AudioSet / AudioSetStrong, and Voxaboxen (overlapping vocalization detection).

Most datasets are openly licensed (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, CC0, public domain). License and source metadata are available per-dataset via Dataset.info — provenance matters.

Quickstart

from alp_data import Beans

# Load 'train' split of the BEANS bioacoustic benchmark at 16kHz.
# Resampling is done on the fly via librosa.
beans = Beans(split="train", sample_rate=16000)

print(len(beans))

# Iterate
for sample in beans:
    print(sample["audio"].shape)
    break

# Indexed access
sample = beans[0]
print(sample["audio"].shape)

# Streaming mode (lower memory; len() not available)
beans_streaming = Beans(split="train", streaming=True)
for sample in beans_streaming:
    print(sample["audio"].shape)
    break

⚠️ Warning: When using a PyTorch DataLoader with num_workers > 0, you must set the multiprocessing start method to "spawn" (not the default "fork" on Linux). alp-data datasets hold cloud-backed I/O handles (fsspec / gcsfs / s3fs) that are not safe to inherit across a fork; using "fork" can deadlock workers or corrupt audio reads. Either call torch.multiprocessing.set_start_method("spawn", force=True) at the top of your program, or pass a "spawn" context to the DataLoader, e.g.:

import torch.multiprocessing as mp
from torch.utils.data import DataLoader

loader = DataLoader(
    dataset,
    num_workers=4,
    multiprocessing_context=mp.get_context("spawn"),
)

Datasets and transforms can also be loaded from a YAML config:

# config.yaml
dataset:
  dataset_name: beans
  split: train
  sample_rate: 16000
  transformations:
    - type: filter
      property: source_dataset
      mode: include
      values: ["watkins"]

from alp_data import dataset_from_config

ds, transform_metadata = dataset_from_config("config.yaml")

# ds now only contains "watkins" samples from the BEANS train split, resampled to 16kHz.

Installation

uv add alp-data

or with pip:

pip install alp-data

Documentation

Full documentation: https://projects.earthspecies.org/alp-data/latest/

Build documentation locally with:

make serve-local-docs
# Hosts docs at http://localhost:8000

Development

This repository uses uv for dependency management.

To install locally for development or running tests:

git clone https://github.com/earthspecies/alp-data.git
cd alp-data
uv sync --dev  # installs all dependencies including dev tools

or with pip:

pip install -e .

# Set up pre-commit hooks (uses prek; pass --overwrite to replace existing pre-commit lib hooks)
uv run prek install

# Run tests (Note: some tests require authentication via google or cloudflare; see test files for details)
uv run pytest

Highlights

• Source-flexible loading — built-in datasets stream from a public Cloudflare R2 bucket; the I/O module can also read from local paths, GCS, S3, and other R2 buckets, with CSV / JSON-Lines / Parquet manifests supported at the backend layer.
• Iterate or random-access indexing — every Dataset supports for sample in ds and ds[i].
• Streaming mode — process datasets larger than memory with streaming=True.
• Configurable transforms — filter rows, select columns, derive labels, deduplicate, balance, upsample long tails, subsample by ratio.
• Combine datasets — ConcatenatedDataset merges multiple datasets with configurable column-merge strategies; ChainedDataset iterates over them sequentially with streaming support.
• Pluggable backends — pandas or polars under the hood, selectable per-Dataset.

License

alp-data is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for the full text.

The datasets accessed through alp-data are governed by their own licenses, set by their original creators — independent of alp-data's code license. Most are openly licensed (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, CC0, public domain), but terms vary per dataset and may include attribution, share-alike, or non-commercial restrictions. Per-dataset license and source metadata are available via Dataset.info.

Contributing

If you're working with a bioacoustic dataset you'd like to see in alp-data, submit this form and the engineering team will follow up.

For questions and further discussion, join our Discourse forum. To report a bug, open an issue on Github.