Apparently, they tried to use the raw audio waveform with the original setup from the WaveNet paper but couldn't get it to train on their TitanX, so they used M

Apparently, they tried to use the raw audio waveform with the original setup from the WaveNet paper but couldn't get it to train on their TitanX, so they used MFCCs instead. It's not exactly clear why this is the case. "Second, the Paper added a mean-pooling layer after the dilated convolution layer for down-sampling. We extracted MFCC from wav files and removed the final mean-pooling layer because the original setting was impossible to run on our TitanX GPU." [1] [1] https://github.com/buriburisuri/speech-to-text-wavenet#speech-to-text-wavenet--end-to-end-sentence-level-english-speech-recognition-using-deepminds-wavenet https://github.com/buriburisuri/speech-to-text-wavenet#speec...