I can't install pyaudio on Windows? How to solve "error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required."?

Question

I have a Windows 10 PC and I want to install pyaudio to use it with my chatbot, powered by chatterbot.

I tried 2 different ways to install pyaudio.

The first way is doing this on the command prompt:

python -m pip install PyAudio

This is the result:

   C:\Users\Waaberi>python -m pip install PyAudio
Collecting PyAudio
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/ab/42/b4f04721c5c5bfc196ce156b3c768998ef8c0ae3654ed29ea5020c749a6b/PyAudio-0.2.11.tar.gz
Installing collected packages: PyAudio
  Running setup.py install for PyAudio ... error
    Complete output from command C:\Users\Waaberi\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\python.exe -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='C:\\Users\\Waaberi\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\pip-install-e5le61j0\\PyAudio\\setup.py';f=getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('\r\n', '\n');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, 'exec'))" install --record C:\Users\Waaberi\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-record-adj3zivl\install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile:
    running install
    running build
    running build_py
    creating build
    creating build\lib.win32-3.7
    copying src\pyaudio.py -> build\lib.win32-3.7
    running build_ext
    building '_portaudio' extension
    error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required. Get it with "Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools": http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools

    ----------------------------------------
Command "C:\Users\Waaberi\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\python.exe -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='C:\\Users\\Waaberi\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\pip-install-e5le61j0\\PyAudio\\setup.py';f=getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('\r\n', '\n');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, 'exec'))" install --record C:\Users\Waaberi\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-record-adj3zivl\install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in C:\Users\Waaberi\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-install-e5le61j0\PyAudio\

The second way is entering this command:

python pip install python-pyaudio

and it does nothing.

Answer 1

The answer by Agalin is already great and I just want to explain it in a step by step format for a novice like myself:

• find your Python version by python --version mine is 3.7.3 for example
• the easiest way to check either you have 64 or 32 Python just open it in the terminal:

• find the appropriate .whl file from here, for example mine is PyAudio‑0.2.11‑cp37‑cp37m‑win_amd64.whl, and download it.
• go to the folder where it is downloaded for example cd C:\Users\foobar\Downloads
• install the .whl file with pip for example in my case:

pip install PyAudio-0.2.11-cp37-cp37m-win_amd64.whl

Answer 2

First run your IDE or CMD as Administrator and run the following commands:

pip install pipwin
pipwin install pyaudio

Answer 3

There is no wheel (prebuilt package) for Python 3.7 on Windows (there is one for Python 2.7 and 3.4 up to 3.6) so you need to prepare build environment on your PC to use this package. Easier would be finding the wheel for 3.7 as some packages are quite hard to build on Windows.

Christoph Gohlke (University of California) hosts Windows wheels for most popular packages for nearly all modern Python versions, including latest PyAudio. You can find it here: https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ (download can be quite slow). After download, just type pip install <downloaded file here>.

There is no difference between python -m pip install, and pip install as long as you're using default installation settings and single python installation. python pip actually tries to run file pip in the current directory.

Edit. See the pipwin comment for automated way of using Mr Gohlke's libs . Note that I've not used it myself and I'm not sure about selecting different package flavors like vanilla and mkl versions of numpy.