Open File with JSONDecodeError

Expected behavior

open a mp3 with no error

Actual behavior

I used the script below:

from pydub import AudioSegment
song = AudioSegment.from_mp3(r"test2.mp3")

and there is a JSONDecodeError

JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

more detail:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
JSONDecodeError                           Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-10-87da299a1c3c> in <module>
      1 from pydub import AudioSegment
      2 
----> 3 song = AudioSegment.from_mp3(r"test2.mp3")
      4 

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pydub\audio_segment.py in from_mp3(cls, file, parameters)
    714     @classmethod
    715     def from_mp3(cls, file, parameters=None):
--> 716         return cls.from_file(file, 'mp3', parameters=parameters)
    717 
    718     @classmethod

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pydub\audio_segment.py in from_file(cls, file, format, codec, parameters, **kwargs)
    663             stdin_data = file.read()
    664 
--> 665         info = mediainfo_json(orig_file)
    666         if info:
    667             audio_streams = [x for x in info['streams']

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pydub\utils.py in mediainfo_json(filepath)
    266     stderr = stderr.decode("utf-8", 'ignore')
    267 
--> 268     info = json.loads(output)
    269 
    270     if not info:

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\json\__init__.py in loads(s, encoding, cls, object_hook, parse_float, parse_int, parse_constant, object_pairs_hook, **kw)
    346             parse_int is None and parse_float is None and
    347             parse_constant is None and object_pairs_hook is None and not kw):
--> 348         return _default_decoder.decode(s)
    349     if cls is None:
    350         cls = JSONDecoder

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\json\decoder.py in decode(self, s, _w)
    335 
    336         """
--> 337         obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
    338         end = _w(s, end).end()
    339         if end != len(s):

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\json\decoder.py in raw_decode(self, s, idx)
    353             obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
    354         except StopIteration as err:
--> 355             raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
    356         return obj, end

Your System configuration

• Python version: 3.7.4
• Pydub version: 0.23.1
• ffmpeg or avlib?: ffmpeg
• ffmpeg/avlib version: 1.4

[kylefoley76]

I got it working. In short, it is an ffmpeg problem not a pydub problem. I had to reinstall ffmpeg not once but twice and it took a lot of work to get it to work and I’ve forgotten how I did it. In any case, if you can get this line in Terminal to work ffmpeg -i input.mp3 output.avi then pydub should work.

[joekadi]

Solved for MacOS using Anaconda3 by downloading ffmpeg and and ffprobe binaries from https://ffbinaries.com/downloads and putting them in my “usr/anaconda3/bin” folder (this directory primarily has executable files). I think the issue occurred because even though I had uninstalled and reinstalled pydub and ffmpeg several times, it was still running an old version of the executables that I had installed from a year ago!