newwave 0.2.0

Drop-in replacement for Pythons wave.py

newwave - drop-in replacement for wave.py

"Enjoy the silence"

newwave is a drop-in replacement for Python's standard library wave module, which is used for reading and writing WAVE audio files.

It backports features from newer Python versions to older ones, so you can use the latest wave improvements on Python 3.10 and later.

Features

Features backported from newer Python versions:

• Support for bytes and path-like objects in wave.open() (from Python 3.15)
• Fix for Wave_write emitting unraisable exception when open() raises (from Python 3.15)
• Removal of deprecated setmark, getmark, getmarkers interfaces (from Python 3.15)
• Support for reading WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE files (from Python 3.12)

Installation

pip install newwave

or with uv:

uv add newwave

Requires Python 3.10 or later.

Usage

Simply replace your wave import with newwave:

# Before
import wave

# After
import newwave as wave

All existing code using wave will continue to work:

import newwave as wave

with wave.open('audio.wav', 'rb') as f:
    print(f.getnchannels(), f.getsampwidth(), f.getframerate())

Relationship to CPython

newwave is not a fork in spirit, but a compatibility and incubation layer for Python’s standard-library wave module.

The goals of this project are to:

• Backport features from newer Python releases to older supported versions.
• Provide fixes for correctness issues in wave.py, such as malformed headers or incorrect frame padding.
• Experiment with and stabilize enhancements (e.g. higher bit depths, extended formats) before proposing them upstream to CPython.

Where practical, fixes and features developed in newwave are intended to be upstreamed to CPython. Some enhancements may remain in newwave if they are not suitable for inclusion in the standard library due to backward-compatibility, policy, or maintenance constraints.

newwave aims to remain a drop-in replacement for wave, preserving the public API and behavior of the standard library wherever possible.

Development

This project uses uv for dependency management and running tests.

Prerequisites

• uv must be installed

Running tests

A Makefile is provided for common development tasks:

make test       # Run tests with the default Python version
make typecheck  # Run type checker (ty)
make fulltest   # Run type checker + tests on Python 3.10–3.15
make clean      # Remove cache directories

Or run tests directly:

uv run pytest

Make WAVEs!