Belt conveyor systems are widely utilized in transportation applications. This research aims to achieve fault detection on belt conveyor idlers with an acoustic signal based method. The presented novel method uses Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients and Gradient Boost Decision Tree for feature extraction and classification. Thirteen Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients are extracted from acquired sound signal as features. A Gradient Boost Decision Tree model is developed and trained. After training, the model is applied to a testing dataset. Results show that the trained model can achieve diagnosis accuracy of 94.53%, as well as recall rate up to 99.7%. This study verifies the proposed method for acoustic signal based fault detection of belt conveyor idlers. (c) 2020 The Society of Powder Technology Japan. Published by Elsevier B.V. and The Society of Powder Technology Japan. All rights reserved.