Play a Sound with Python

Question

What's the easiest way to play a sound file (.wav) in Python? By easiest I mean both most platform independent and requiring the least dependencies. pygame is certainly an option, but it seems overkill for just sound.

Answer 1

pyMedia's sound example does just that. This should be all you need.

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 )

Answer 2

The Snack Sound Toolkit can play wav, au and mp3 files.

s = Sound() 
s.read('sound.wav') 
s.play()

Answer 3

Definitely use Pyglet for this. It's kind of a large package, but it is pure python with no extension modules. That will definitely be the easiest for deployment. It's also got great format and codec support.

import pyglet

music = pyglet.resource.media('music.mp3')
music.play()

pyglet.app.run()

Answer 4

For Windows, you can use winsound. It's built in

import winsound, sys

def beep(sound):
    winsound.PlaySound('%s.wav' % sound, winsound.SND_FILENAME)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    beep(sys.argv[1])

You should be able to use ossaudiodev for linux:

from wave import open as waveOpen
from ossaudiodev import open as ossOpen
s = waveOpen('tada.wav','rb')
(nc,sw,fr,nf,comptype, compname) = s.getparams( )
dsp = ossOpen('/dev/dsp','w')
try:
  from ossaudiodev import AFMT_S16_NE
except ImportError:
  if byteorder == "little":
    AFMT_S16_NE = ossaudiodev.AFMT_S16_LE
  else:
    AFMT_S16_NE = ossaudiodev.AFMT_S16_BE
dsp.setparameters(AFMT_S16_NE, nc, fr)
data = s.readframes(nf)
s.close()
dsp.write(data)
dsp.close()

(Credit for ossaudiodev: Bill Dandreta http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-October/288905.html)

Answer 5

I like pygame, and the command below should work:

pygame.init()
pygame.mixer.Sound('sound.wav').play()

but it doesn't on either of my computers, and there is limited help on the subject out there. edit: I figured out why the pygame sound isn't working for me, it's not loading most sounds correctly, the 'length' attribute is ~0.0002 when I load them. maybe loading them using something other than mygame will get it morking more generally.

with pyglet I'm getting a resource not found error Using the above example, wigh both relative and full paths to the files.

using pyglet.media.load() instead of pyglet.resource.media() lets me load the files.

but sound.play() only plays the first fraction of a second of the file, unless I run pyglet.app.run() which blocks everything else...

Answer 6

wxPython has support for playing wav files on Windows and Unix - I am not sure if this includes Macs. However it only support wav files as far as I can tell - it does not support other common formats such as mp3 or ogg.