Python: what are the nearest Linux and OSX equivalents of winsound.Beep?

Question

If one wishes to beep the speaker on Windows, Python 2 apparently provides a useful function: winsound.Beep(). The neat thing about this function is that it takes arguments specifying the exact frequency and duration of the beep. This is exactly what I want to do, except that I don't use Windows. So...

What are the nearest equivalents of winsound.Beep() for Linux and OSX, bringing in as few dependencies as possible?

Please note that I want to be able to beep the speaker directly, not to play a sound file. Also, I need to be able to control the frequency and duration of the beep, so curses.beep() and print '\a' won't do. Lastly, I am aware that PyGame provides extensive sound capabilities, but given that I don't require any of PyGame's other functionality, that would seem like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut (and anyway, I'm trying to do away with dependencies as far as possible).

Answer 1

winsound is only for windows and I could not find any cross platform way to do this, other than print "/a". However, you cannot set the frequency and duration with this.

However, you can try the os.system command to do the same with the system command beep. Here is a snippet, which defines the function playsound in a platform independent way

try:     import winsound except ImportError:     import os     def playsound(frequency,duration):         #apt-get install beep         os.system('beep -f %s -l %s' % (frequency,duration)) else:     def playsound(frequency,duration):         winsound.Beep(frequency,duration) 

For more info, look at this blog

EDIT: You will need to install the beep package on linux to run the beep command. You can install by giving the command

sudo apt-get install beep 

Answer 2

I found a potential solution here: http://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/25217-beeping-under-linux

It involves writing directly to /dev/audio. Not sure how portable it is or if it even works at all - i'm not on a linux machine atm.

def beep(frequency, amplitude, duration):     sample = 8000     half_period = int(sample/frequency/2)     beep = chr(amplitude)*half_period+chr(0)*half_period     beep *= int(duration*frequency)     audio = file('/dev/audio', 'wb')     audio.write(beep)     audio.close()