audioread 0.1

multi-library, cross-platform audio decoding

Decode audio files using whichever library is available. The library currently supports:

• Gstreamer via gst-python.

• Core Audio on Mac OS X via ctypes. (PyObjC not required.)

• MAD via the pymad bindings.

• FFmpeg via its command-line interface.

Use the library like so:

with audioread.audio_open(filename) as f:
    print f.channels, f.samplerate, f.duration
    for buf in f:
        do_something(buf)

Buffers in the file can be accessed by iterating over the object returned from audio_open. Each buffer is a buffer or str object containing raw 16-bit little-endian integer PCM data. (Currently, these PCM format attributes are not configurable, but this could be added to most of the backends.)

Additional values are available as fields on the audio file object:

• channels is the number of audio channels (an integer).

• samplerate is given in Hz (an integer).

• duration is the length of the audio in seconds (a float).

The audio_open function automatically selects a backend that can read the file. (Each backend is implemented in a module inside the audioread package.) If no backends succeed in opening the file, a DecodeError exception is raised. This exception is only used when the file type is unsupported by the backends; if the file doesn’t exist, a standard IOError will be raised.

Future Work

Possible additional backends:

• PyOgg?

• Other command-line tools?

Example

The included decode.py script demonstrates using this package to convert compressed audio files to WAV files.

Et Cetera

audioread is by Adrian Sampson. It is made available under the MIT license. An alternative to this module is decoder.py.