What is the easiest way to read wav-files using Python [summary]?

Question

I want to use Python to access a wav-file and write its content in a form which allows me to analyze it (let\'s say arrays).

1. I heard that \"audiolab\" is a sui

Answer 1

Have you tried the wave module? It has fewer dependencies:

http://docs.python.org/library/wave.html

def everyOther (v, offset=0):
   return [v[i] for i in range(offset, len(v), 2)]

def wavLoad (fname):
   wav = wave.open (fname, "r")
   (nchannels, sampwidth, framerate, nframes, comptype, compname) = wav.getparams ()
   frames = wav.readframes (nframes * nchannels)
   out = struct.unpack_from ("%dh" % nframes * nchannels, frames)

   # Convert 2 channles to numpy arrays
   if nchannels == 2:
       left = array (list (everyOther (out, 0)))
       right = array (list  (everyOther (out, 1)))
   else:
       left = array (out)
       right = left

Answer 2

I wrote a simple wrapper over the wave module in the std lib. it's called pydub and it has a method for reading samples from the audio data as ints.

>>> from pydub import AudioSegment
>>> song = AudioSegment.from_wav("your_song.wav")
<pydub.audio_segment.AudioSegment at 0x1068868d0>

>>> # This song is stereo
>>> song.channels
2

>>> # get the 5000th "frame" in the song
>>> frame = song.get_frame(5000)

>>> sample_left, sample_right = frame[:2], frame[2:]
>>> def sample_to_int(sample): 
        return int(sample.encode("hex"), 16)

>>> sample_to_int(sample_left)
8448

>>> sample_to_int(sample_right)
9984

Hopefully this helps

Answer 3

audiolab is the best way, but it doesn't work in every environment and the developer's not working on it. I'm still using Python 2.5 so I can use it.

Did you install libsndfile?

Answer 4

After trying so many things that does not work I used the decode library from Use (Python) Gstreamer to decode audio (to PCM data) and build a function to parse the raw pcm data into a scipy array.

It's nice and can open any audio file that gstreamer can open: http://gist.github.com/592776 (see Test and the end of the file for usage info)

Answer 5

You can also use the wave module along with the numpy.fromstring() function to convert it to an array

import wave
import numpy

fp = wave.open('test.wav')
nchan = fp.getnchannels()
N = fp.getnframes()
dstr = fp.readframes(N*nchan)
data = numpy.fromstring(dstr, numpy.int16)
data = numpy.reshape(data, (-1,nchan))

Answer 6

audiolab seems to be not maintained anymore, you should try PySoundFile.

Installation is simple:

pip install PySoundFile --user

And reading a sound file as well:

import soundfile as sf
x, fs = sf.read('/usr/share/sounds/purple/receive.wav')

Have a look at this overview about different Python libraries for handling sound files.