On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Todd <toddrjen@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 9:39 PM, Todd <toddrjen@gmail.com> wrote:

Is anyone aware of a well-maintained, simple, cross-platform python package that can play a numpy array as sound over speakers?

I am aware of https://wiki.python.org/moin/Audio/. However, in all the cases there, as far as I can find they either do not support numpy arrays, are not cross-platform, cannot playback sound at all, or are unmaintained. There is also PySoundCard, which would do what I need but also appears to be unmaintained (no release in over a year, and no commits in 5 months, no release with serious bugfixes mentioned in commits).

So in terms of raw waveform playback (as opposed to music note playback), I have done some more searching and I think I have found something that works. It is the "audio.io" package (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/audio.io/). It has a recent release (late 2014), supports numpy arrays, and is cross-platform through PyAudio. It is just a VERY thin wrapper around PyAudio (less than 100 lines). However, there is no website, no issue tracker, essentially no documentation, and has several projects copied into its tarball (including setputools, about, and sh).

Here are the reasonably maintained, reasonably relevant alternatives I have been able to find:

PyAudio: maintained, cross-platform, doesn't support numpy. It seems to be used as a backend by a lot of other projects.

audiolazy: cross-platform, supports numpy, has not seen a release since 2013 but its github repo is still seeing commits so it may have more releases in the future. Uses PyAudio. Provides a lot of other powerful audio-handling and audio-processing capabilities.

PySoundCard: cross-platform, supports numpy, has not seen a release in over a year and its github repo has not seen a commit in 5 months, but another related project (PySoundFile) has seen commits and releases recently. The only option amongst these that does NOT rely on PyAudio.

pydub: maintained, cross-platform, doesn't appear to support numpy but the audio output is undocumented so I can't be sure. Uses PyAudio or ffmpeg if PyAudio is not available.

Just an update on cross-platform, numpy-compatible sound I/O packages:

I have found some other possibilities:

The "JACK-Client" package (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/JACK-Client/) is the furthest along and most established. It has been around for almost a year, has three contributors, and has seen four releases. However, it has gained built-in numpy support since my last update, which is why it hasn't appeared previously. The maintainer seems to be a member of an established auditory research group with a good open-source software track record. It seems to be a traditionally MATLAB group but they are adding more and more python packages.

The "sounddevice" package (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sounddevice/). It only has only been around for a few months and only has one contributor so far. However, the maintainer is the same as the maintainer of the "JACK-Client" package, it has a github repo with continued commits, a couple other people submitting issues. Since "JACK-Client" seems to have done okay, I hope this package will as well.

The "hear" package (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Hear/) is in a similar situation, although with a different maintainer. It has been around about the same amount of time, has about the same number of releases, and only has one contributor. The maintainer seems to have a good track record with open-source software and experience with sound processing, so it has some promise too.

Otherwise, there has been no change. None of the other packages I listed that support numpy have seen a release in the last year.