This repository serves as a comprehensive, curated list of open-source datasets for AI audio research, covering speech, music, and sound effects. It aims to provide a centralized resource for researchers and developers building generative AI models, intelligent audio tools, and various audio applications.

How It Works

The project aggregates links and brief descriptions of numerous publicly available audio datasets. It categorizes these datasets into Speech, Music, and Sound Effects, with extensive sub-categorization within each. The descriptions highlight the dataset's size, content, intended use, and key features, facilitating quick evaluation for specific AI audio tasks.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Access: Datasets are accessed via external links provided in the README. Many require direct download or application.
• Requirements: Vary significantly per dataset, ranging from standard audio file formats to specific annotation requirements (e.g., time-aligned transcriptions, emotion labels, MIDI data). Some datasets may have usage restrictions or require specific software for processing.
• Resources: Downloading and processing these datasets can require substantial disk space and computational resources, depending on the size and complexity of the chosen datasets.

Highlighted Details

• Breadth: Encompasses over 100 speech datasets, 150+ music datasets, and 30+ sound effect datasets.
• Diversity: Covers a wide array of languages, musical genres, sound event types, and data modalities (audio, MIDI, annotations).
• Task Focus: Datasets are suitable for ASR, TTS, voice conversion, music information retrieval, audio captioning, sound event detection, and more.
• Scale: Includes datasets ranging from small, specialized collections to massive corpora with tens of thousands of hours of audio.

Maintenance & Community

• This is a curated list, not an active development project. Maintenance appears to be limited to updating the list of available datasets.
• Community interaction is primarily through GitHub issues and pull requests for suggesting new datasets or corrections.

Licensing & Compatibility

• License: Varies by individual dataset. Many are released under permissive licenses (e.g., CC-BY, MIT), but some have specific research-only or non-commercial clauses (e.g., Microsoft Speech Corpus).
• Compatibility: Users must verify the license of each dataset for their intended use, especially for commercial applications.

Limitations & Caveats

The repository itself does not host data; it only provides links. Dataset availability, access methods, and licensing are entirely dependent on the original sources, which may change or become unavailable. Some descriptions may be outdated or lack critical technical details for immediate adoption.