Play audio with Python

Question

Your best bet is probably to use pygame/SDL. It's an external library, but it has great support across platforms.

pygame.mixer.init()
pygame.mixer.music.load("file.mp3")
pygame.mixer.music.play()

You can find more specific documentation about the audio mixer support in the pygame.mixer.music documentation

Try playsound which is a Pure Python, cross platform, single function module with no dependencies for playing sounds.

Install via pip:

$ pip install playsound

Once you've installed, you can use it like this:

from playsound import playsound
playsound('/path/to/a/sound/file/you/want/to/play.mp3')

Take a look at Simpleaudio, which is a relatively recent and lightweight library for this purpose:

> pip install simpleaudio

Then:

import simpleaudio as sa

wave_obj = sa.WaveObject.from_wave_file("path/to/file.wav")
play_obj = wave_obj.play()
play_obj.wait_done()

Make sure to use uncompressed 16 bit PCM files.

You can find information about Python audio here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/Audio/

It doesn't look like it can play .mp3 files without external libraries. You could either convert your .mp3 file to a .wav or other format, or use a library like PyMedia.

In pydub we've recently opted to use ffplay (via subprocess) from the ffmpeg suite of tools, which internally uses SDL.

It works for our purposes – mainly just making it easier to test the results of pydub code in interactive mode – but it has it's downsides, like causing a new program to appear in the dock on mac.

I've linked the implementation above, but a simplified version follows:

import subprocess

def play(audio_file_path):
    subprocess.call(["ffplay", "-nodisp", "-autoexit", audio_file_path])

The -nodisp flag stops ffplay from showing a new window, and the -autoexit flag causes ffplay to exit and return a status code when the audio file is done playing.

edit: pydub now uses pyaudio for playback when it's installed and falls back to ffplay to avoid the downsides I mentioned. The link above shows that implementation as well.