Play Music and Audio File in Python

With this tutorial, we are going to see how you can download audio clips and play them within a python program on a Raspberry Pi or any other hardware running a python application. For this application, you will first download wave or MP3 file, then we shall see how to adjust the audio properties of the file and test play the file from the Linux shell.

We shall them look at a Python implementation to play the Audio file as may be required. Before we start, we need to download a few libraries that we shall need

The Pygame Library is a framework that is mainly used for developing simple games in Python. In most cases, most Linux distributions including Raspbian come pre-installed with Pygame. We can therefore use this frame work to play music and sounds

In case your distribution does not have pygame pre-installed, you may install it with the commands below

pi@raspberrypi:/ $ sudo apt-get update
pi@raspberrypi:/ $ sudo apt-get install python3-pygame

With pygame installed, we will need to use another Linux tool to set our Audio properties. Amixer: allows command-line control of the mixer for the ALSA soundcard driver. We shall therefore use the amixer Linux tool to adjust the volume on our sound card.

To configure the Audio, plug your your Audio Output into your Raspberry Pi or PC. Please make sure that from your configuration (rasp-config for raspberry pi) you have the 3.5mm headphone jack selected as your primary output

With that configured, we must then apply the Audio configurations from the terminal with the following commands

pi@raspberrypi:/ $ amixer set PCM unmute
pi@raspberrypi:/ $ amixer set PCM 100%

Use the amixer command to verify that everything is running as required. You should have the result below

pi@raspberrypi: $ amixer

Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 65536
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 99957 [153%] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 99957 [153%] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
  Capabilities: cvolume cswitch cswitch-joined
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Capture 0 - 65536
  Front Left: Capture 99957 [153%] [on]
  Front Right: Capture 99957 [153%] [on]

Now that all is set, we are ready to implement our python application. I have written a simple program to play a wave file that i a have already downloaded in my working directory. The Audio file is played in a loop with a delay of 10 seconds

import os, time
from pygame import mixer

def playSound():
        # Initialize pygame mixer
    mixer.init()
        # Load the sounds
    sound = mixer.Sound('myAudio.wav')
        # play sounds
    sound.play()
         # wait for sound to finish playing
    time.sleep(3)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    while(True):
	playSound() 
        time.sleep(10)