Playing audio in the background

I searched the internet and looked into the code and it seems currently there’s no way to play sounds in the background of the script. So things like:

import pydub
from pydub.playback import play
import os

pydub.AudioSegment.converter = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)) + r"\ffmpeg.exe"
file = pydub.AudioSegment.from_mp3(r"file.mp3")
print("This should be playing music.")
play(file)
print("It has now played music")

Will print This should be playing music, wait until it ends and then print It has now played music!

A workaround for this would be to export the mp3 file into wav, use winsound to play the file (with the SND_ASYNC flag) then delete it at the end of the script.

[jiaaro]

@guysoft First off, your implementation looks good, and anyone using (or wanting to use) pyaudio should have a look!

Having said that, if you use simpleaudio pydub.playback.play() does playback in a thread and it responds to keyboard interrupt properly. If you use pydub’s internal helper function (or just use simpleaudio directly) you can call a function at any time to stop playback:

import time

from pydub import generators
from pydub.playback import _play_with_simpleaudio

# 5 seconds of A 440
sound = generators.Sine(440).to_audio_segment(duration=5000)

##### using pydub's helper function:
playback = _play_with_simpleaudio(audio_segment)

# end playback after 3 seconds
time.sleep(3)
playback.stop()

##### using simpleaudio directly:
import simpleaudio
playback = simpleaudio.play_buffer(
    sound.raw_data, 
    num_channels=sound.channels, 
    bytes_per_sample=sound.sample_width, 
    sample_rate=sound.frame_rate
)
# end playback after 3 seconds
time.sleep(3)
playback.stop()

[guysoft]

Hey guys, I also needed to write this, since I couldn’t find a full solution here is mine: https://gist.github.com/guysoft/bda8ff5be7eb708fd7057850d788dbdf

You can -h the file and see how to run it. If you want this as a PR please tell me what needs to be done.