Playing an Audio widget programmatically?

I tried to play an Audio widget programmatically, but I don’t see a play()-like method to do that, like:

from ipywidgets import Audio
w = Audio.from_file("audio/a.mp3", autoplay=False, loop=False)
w.play()
# AttributeError: 'Audio' object has no attribute 'play'

Is it possible?

[jasongrout]

tl;dr: I support adding a playing attribute to the audio/video widgets, and would support adding a volume attribute as well.

Currently the audio and video widgets have the following attributes exposed from the HTML media element:

• autoplay - start playing immediately on display
• loop - loop the audio
• controls - boolean saying whether the browser should display controls.

I think it makes sense to expose others that help in managing the media element. From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaElement, for example, we could expose:

• volume (there is an event for volumechange we can use to notify the python side)
• and also, as suggested here, a playing attribute that uses the .play() and .pause() methods to control the playback, and there are play/pause events we can use to notify the python side

There are some other attributes we could expose like muted and playbackRate, but it’s not clear (a) how useful it would be and (b) what events could be used to send notification back to python if they changed from user interaction.

[nmstoker]

My autoplay method is clunky and won’t give the kind of control that lets you stop playback, but it would work to trigger playback programmatically if you didn’t mind the side effects.

Generally speaking though a better solution (eg with widget code /use of web audio API as you mention) seems the smarter way to go, but I don’t know if there’s any progress there