Copy pasting update from #3902 (comment):

Deprecated APIs

Most APIs marked as "Drop" are now explicitly deprecated, raising deprecation warnings in the docs, and when using them from Python. They will be removed in the next 2.9 version.

Migration of load() and save() to TorchCodec

As we mentioned, we are consolidating the decoding and encoding capabilities of PyTorch in TorchCodec.

torchaudio.load() and torchaudio.save() are some of the most popular TorchAudio APIs, so for convenience we are providing torchaudio.load_with_torchcodec() and torchaudio.save_with_torchcodec(), which can largely be used as drop-in replacements. However, we do encourage users to directly migrate to TorchCodec's AudioDecoder() and AudioEncoder().

In future versions, torchaudio.load() and torchaudio.save() will still exist, but their underlying implementation will be relying on torchaudio.load_with_torchcodec() and torchaudio.save_with_torchcodec().

We hope for this migration to be as smooth as possible - most users should just need to pip install torchcodec, and things should still work as-is.

TorchCodec doesn't support Windows yet, but we're working hard on it. Please bear with us.

C++ and CUDA extension

We mentioned that we were exploring options to retain the C++-backed APIs, which are currently slated for deletion. Specifically: forced_align, lfilter, overdrive, RNNT, and CUCTC.

While this isn't something I can assert with 100% certainty, we are now more confident that we'll be able to preserve these extensions by porting them to Pytorch's new "stable ABI" operators. We are actively working on it.