Ka-Ping Yee writes:
Side note: is there a well-defined platform-independent sound interface we should be conforming to? It would be nice to have a single Python function for each of the following things:
1. Play a .wav file given its filename.
2. Play a .au file given its filename.
These may be possible.
3. Play some raw audio data, given a string of bytes and a sampling rate.
This would never be possible unless you also specifed the format and encoding of the raw data - are they 8bit, 16-bit, signed, unsigned, bigendian, littlendian, linear, logarithmic ("mu_law"), etc? Not only that, but some audio hardware will support some formats and not others. Some sound drivers will attempt to convert from a data format which is not supported by the audio hardware to one which is, and others will just reject the data if it's not in a format supported by the hardware. Trying to do anything with sound in a platform-independent manner is near-impossible. Even the same "platform" (e.g. RedHat 6.2 on Intel) will behave differently depending on what soundcard is installed.