The goal of megadepth is to provide an R interface to the command line tool Megadepth for BigWig and BAM related utilities created by Christopher Wilks (Wilks, Ahmed, Baker, Zhang, Collado-Torres, and Langmead, 2020). This R package enables fast processing of BigWig files on downstream packages such as dasper and recount3. The Megadepth software also provides utilities for processing BAM files and extracting coverage information from them.

Here is an illustration on how fast megadepth is compared to other tools for processing local and remote BigWig files.