What's a cross platform way to play a sound file in python?

Question

Hey guys,

I tried playing a .wav file using pyaudio. It works great on windows, but doesn't work in Ubuntu when another device is using sound.

The error is "IOError: [Errorno Invalid output device (no default output device)] -9996

Is there another library I could try to use? Another method?

Answer 1

Have you looked at pymedia? It looks as easy as this to play a WAV file:

import time, wave, pymedia.audio.sound as sound
f= wave.open('YOUR FILE NAME', 'rb')
sampleRate= f.getframerate()
channels= f.getnchannels()
format= sound.AFMT_S16_LE
snd= sound.Output(sampleRate, channels, format)
s= f.readframes(300000)
snd.play(s)
while snd.isPlaying(): time.sleep(0.05)

Ref: http://pymedia.org/tut/play_wav.html

Of course, you can have a look at the Python wiki under Audio (http://wiki.python.org/moin/Audio/) for other libraries such as http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/lib/module-wave.html or again in Python's wiki under Game Libraries (http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonGameLibraries) that will point you to bindings to OpenAL or Pygame that has sound modules.

And finally, although I don't know the limitations of pyaudio, your error message sounds more like the library is not able to find the default output device more than the device is in use by another process. Maybe have a look at what output device is returned by the get_default_output_device_info of pyaudio and compare it to whatever's your default setting in Ubuntu.

Answer 2

You can use wxPython

sound = wx.Sound('sound.wav')
sound.Play(wx.SOUND_SYNC)

or

sound.Play(wx.SOUND_ASYNC)

Here is an example from the wxPython demo.

Answer 3

I'm not absolutely sure if that fulfills your requirements, but I immediately thought PyGame

http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/mixer.html#pygame.mixer.Sound

from pygame import mixer

mixer.init()
s = mixer.Sound('sound.wav')
s.play()