Native MP3 Decoder?

floguy at gmail.com floguy at gmail.com
Sat Sep 30 14:55:57 EDT 2006


I've been working on a simple cross-platform alarm clock application in
Python.  I took the time to learn wxPython for the frontend, and
figured there would be some backend for decoding mp3s to play at alarm
time.  So far, I have found 3 viable options.

1) pyMedia, which works great, but only works on Windows XP and Linux,
and not MacOSX
2) pyGame, which seems to lack the needed SDL_mixer support for
pygame.music
3) wx.MediaCtrl, which supposedly works on Windows and MacOSX, but not
Linux

So, I began to look for a pure Python MP3 decoder.  To my surprise,
there was not one implementation to be found.  Is Python too slow for a
pure Python MP3 decoder?  I would like to help in getting something
like this started.  Unfortunately, I have almost no knowledge of the
underlying MP3 algorithm. I know that there is a MP3 decoder written in
pure Java, called javazoom, which could be drawn from heavily.

I have begun taking that code and porting it to Python, but what I
really need is an someone who is experienced who can help me out with
some of the implementation details.

If anyone knows of another project like this, an alternative that I
haven't found yet, or has experience in mp3 decoding, please respond
with your thoughts.




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