Difference between load of librosa and read of scipy.io.wavfile

It's worth also mentioning that librosa.load() normalizes the data (so that all the data points are between 1 and -1), whereas wavfile.read() does not.

The data is different because scipy does not normalize the input signal.

Here is a snippet showing how to change scipy output to match librosa's:

nbits = 16

l_wave, rate = librosa.core.load(path, sr=None)
rate, s_wave = scipy.io.wavfile.read(path)

s_wave /= 2 ** (nbits - 1)

all(s_wave == l_wave)
# True

From the docstring of librosa.core.load:

Load an audio file as a floating point time series.

Audio will be automatically resampled to the given rate (default sr=22050).

To preserve the native sampling rate of the file, use sr=None.

scipy.io.wavfile.read does not automatically resample the data, and the samples are not converted to floating point if they are integers in the file.