Which library for audio playback ?

[Jérôme]

I'm writing a small application that plays sound through the speakers. The
sounds are juste sine waves of arbitrary frequency I create in the code, not
sample .wav files.

I didn't expect the choice for an audio library to be that complicated. There
are several libraries, and none of them seems to be *the* reference.

Searching the web, I found these resources :

http://wiki.python.org/moin/Audio
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonInMusic

* I privileged ALSA to OSS as I read elsewhere that OSS is deprecated, or on
its way to be. (And JACK is not widely installed, apart from specific
applications (audio work).)

* Then, I picked the alsaaudio library (http://pyalsaaudio.sourceforge.net/).
I don't remember exactly why. I think the project had the most recent
updates. I don't think any project claims to be (let alone aims at being)
complete.

I'm wondering if I made a sensible choice.

There are other libraries, including the following two that are platform
independent :

* PyAudiere (http://pyaudiere.org/), OSS , not packaged for debian
* PyAudio (http://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/)

What solution would you recommend ?

Are there other criterions I should take into account ?

Thanks.

 

[K Richard Pixley]

I'm writing a small application that plays sound through the speakers. The
sounds are juste sine waves of arbitrary frequency I create in the code, not
sample .wav files.

I didn't expect the choice for an audio library to be that complicated. There
are several libraries, and none of them seems to be *the* reference.

Searching the web, I found these resources :

http://wiki.python.org/moin/Audio
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonInMusic

* I privileged ALSA to OSS as I read elsewhere that OSS is deprecated, or on
its way to be. (And JACK is not widely installed, apart from specific
applications (audio work).)

* Then, I picked the alsaaudio library (http://pyalsaaudio.sourceforge.net/).
I don't remember exactly why. I think the project had the most recent
updates. I don't think any project claims to be (let alone aims at being)
complete.

I'm wondering if I made a sensible choice.

There are other libraries, including the following two that are platform
independent :

* PyAudiere (http://pyaudiere.org/), OSS , not packaged for debian
* PyAudio (http://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/)

What solution would you recommend ?

Are there other criterions I should take into account ?

Thanks.

I made a similar survey of available libraries recently. I'm interested
in MIDI also, though, primarily on mac.

There doesn't seem to be any definitive audio library for linux,
although several, (jack, oss, alsa), exist. (My impression is similar
to yours, OSS is obsolete. Jack may be the better library technically,
but is not as widely ported or available as ALSA.)

There is a definitive library for both audio and MIDI on mac - core
audio. There really aren't any competitors.

There is also a definitive library for windows, although I don't use
windows. It's the open source one with low latency that everyone in the
professional world uses to replace windows because, (surprise!), windows
isn't capable of coping.

I have found python libraries for each of these, although some are very
low level libraries, basically just wrapping something even lower. If
anyone has done an integrated "full solution" for linux or mac, I didn't
find it. The closest I found was PortMIDI and PortAudio which appear to
have ports for all three platforms as well as one or two sets of python
bindings and seem to be high enough level to be both useful and
productive. The hard part there is that PortMIDI and PortAudio come in
source, which requires a bit of hunting to track down prerequisites, etc.

Please keep us posted as I'm chasing a similar problem.

--rich

 

[Jérôme]

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:17:51 -0800
K Richard Pixley a écrit:

I made a similar survey of available libraries recently. I'm interested
in MIDI also, though, primarily on mac.

There doesn't seem to be any definitive audio library for linux,
although several, (jack, oss, alsa), exist. (My impression is similar
to yours, OSS is obsolete. Jack may be the better library technically,
but is not as widely ported or available as ALSA.)

There is a definitive library for both audio and MIDI on mac - core
audio. There really aren't any competitors.

There is also a definitive library for windows, although I don't use
windows. It's the open source one with low latency that everyone in the
professional world uses to replace windows because, (surprise!), windows
isn't capable of coping.

I have found python libraries for each of these, although some are very
low level libraries, basically just wrapping something even lower. If
anyone has done an integrated "full solution" for linux or mac, I didn't
find it. The closest I found was PortMIDI and PortAudio which appear to
have ports for all three platforms as well as one or two sets of python
bindings and seem to be high enough level to be both useful and
productive. The hard part there is that PortMIDI and PortAudio come in
source, which requires a bit of hunting to track down prerequisites, etc.

Please keep us posted as I'm chasing a similar problem.

Hi.

Looking at it again, I've narrowed down to the following few :

ossaudiodev
http://docs.python.org/library/ossaudiodev.html
Linux only but included in python

pygame
http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/mixer.html#pygame.mixer.Sound
Most occurring answer on forums and mailing-lists on the net for this
question. Might be a little overkill...

PortAudio
http://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/
http://www.portaudio.com/
Cross-platform, packaged for debian. Could fit my needs as well.

Generally, the examples I find are about opening and playing a wavefile. I
guess I'm gonna have to work a little to feed them a homegrown sinewave of
arbitrary frequency.

Regarding PortAudio,
python /usr/share/doc/python-pyaudio/examples/system_info.py (and other
examples) yield complaints about jack not being running. I assume they could
be tweaked to use ALSA instead.

I haven't had time to dig any further. If I come up with something, I'll keep
you posted.

Thanks for your answer.