Play a Sound with Python

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.

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

import winsound

winsound.PlaySound('sound.wav', winsound.SND_FILENAME)

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:
  from sys import byteorder
  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)

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

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

This seems ridiculous and far fetched but you could always use Windows (or whatever OS you prefer) to manage the sound for you!

import os
os.system("start C:/thepathyouwant/file")

Simple, no extensions, somewhat slow and junky, but working.

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()

After the play() command add a delay of say 10 secs or so, it'll work

import pygame

import time

pygame.init()

pygame.mixer.music.load("test.wav")

pygame.mixer.music.play()

time.sleep(10)

This also plays .mp3 files.

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 )

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...

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.

I just released a simple python wrapper around sox that will play a sound with Python. It's very easy to install as you need Python 2.6 or greater, sox (easy to get binaries for most architectures) and the wrapper ( https://github.com/standarddeviant/sound4python ). If you don't have sox, go here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/files/sox/

You would play audio with it by:

from sound4python import sound
import random
a = []
for idx in xrange(1*16000):
    a.append(random.randint(-16384,16384))
sound(a)

Keep in mind, the only parts actually involved in playing audio are just these:

from sound4python import sound
...
sound(a)    

For Linux user, if low level pcm data manipulation is needed, try alsaaudio module. There is a playwav.py example inside the package too.