The soundfile module is an audio library based on libsndfile, CFFI and NumPy. Full documentation is available on https://python-soundfile.readthedocs.io/.
The soundfile
module can read and write sound files. File reading/writing is
supported through libsndfile,
which is a free, cross-platform, open-source (LGPL) library for reading
and writing many different sampled sound file formats that runs on many
platforms including Windows, OS X, and Unix. It is accessed through
CFFI, which is a foreign function
interface for Python calling C code. CFFI is supported for CPython 2.6+,
3.x and PyPy 2.0+. The soundfile
module represents audio data as NumPy arrays.
The soundfile
module has evolved rapidly in the past. Most
notably, we changed the import name from import pysoundfile
to
import soundfile
in 0.7. In 0.6, we cleaned up many small
inconsistencies, particularly in the the ordering and naming of
function arguments and the removal of the indexing interface.
In 0.8.0, we changed the default value of always_2d
from True
to False
. Also, the order of arguments of the write
function
changed from write(data, file, ...)
to write(file, data, ...)
.
In 0.9.0, we changed the ctype
arguments of the buffer_*
methods to dtype
, using the Numpy dtype
notation. The old
ctype
arguments still work, but are now officially deprecated.
In 0.12.0, we changed the load order of the libsndfile library. Now, the packaged libsndfile in the platform-specific wheels is tried before falling back to any system-provided libsndfile. If you would prefer using the system-provided libsndfile, install the source package or source wheel instead of the platform-specific wheels.
The soundfile
module depends on the Python packages CFFI and NumPy, and the
library libsndfile.
In a modern Python, you can use pip install soundfile
to download
and install the latest release of the soundfile
module and its
dependencies. On Windows (64/32) and OS X (Intel/ARM) and Linux 64,
this will also install a current version of the library libsndfile. If
you install the source module, you need to install libsndfile using
your distribution's package manager, for example sudo apt install
libsndfile1
.
If you are running on an unusual platform or if you are using an older version of Python, you might need to install NumPy and CFFI separately, for example using the Anaconda package manager.
Soundfile
itself does not contain any compiled code and can be
bundled into a wheel with the usual python setup.py bdist_wheel
.
However, soundfile
relies on libsndfile, and optionally ships its
own copy of libsndfile in the wheel.
To build a binary wheel that contains libsndfile, make sure to
checkout and update the _soundfile_data
submodule, then run
python setup.py bdist_wheel
as usual. If the resulting file size
of the wheel is around one megabyte, a matching libsndfile has been
bundled (without libsndfile, it's around 25 KB).
To build binary wheels for all supported platforms, run python
build_wheels.py
, which will python setup.py bdist_wheel
for each
of the platforms we have precompiled libsndfiles for.
In case of API usage errors the soundfile
module raises the usual ValueError or TypeError.
For other errors SoundFileError is raised (used to be RuntimeError). Particularly, a LibsndfileError subclass of this exception is raised on errors reported by the libsndfile library. In that case the exception object provides the libsndfile internal error code in the LibsndfileError.code attribute and the raw libsndfile error message in the LibsndfileError.error_string attribute.
Data can be written to the file using soundfile.write(), or read from
the file using soundfile.read(). The soundfile
module can open all file formats
that libsndfile supports, for example WAV,
FLAC, OGG and MAT files (see Known Issues below about writing OGG files).
Here is an example for a program that reads a wave file and copies it into an FLAC file:
import soundfile as sf
data, samplerate = sf.read('existing_file.wav')
sf.write('new_file.flac', data, samplerate)
Sound files can also be read in short, optionally overlapping blocks with soundfile.blocks(). For example, this calculates the signal level for each block of a long file:
import numpy as np
import soundfile as sf
rms = [np.sqrt(np.mean(block**2)) for block in
sf.blocks('myfile.wav', blocksize=1024, overlap=512)]
Sound files can also be opened as SoundFile objects. Every SoundFile has a specific sample rate, data format and a set number of channels.
If a file is opened, it is kept open for as long as the SoundFile object exists. The file closes when the object is garbage collected, but you should use the SoundFile.close() method or the context manager to close the file explicitly:
import soundfile as sf
with sf.SoundFile('myfile.wav', 'r+') as f:
while f.tell() < f.frames:
pos = f.tell()
data = f.read(1024)
f.seek(pos)
f.write(data*2)
All data access uses frames as index. A frame is one discrete time-step in the sound file. Every frame contains as many samples as there are channels in the file.
soundfile.read() can usually auto-detect the file type of sound files. This is not possible for RAW files, though:
import soundfile as sf
data, samplerate = sf.read('myfile.raw', channels=1, samplerate=44100,
subtype='FLOAT')
Note that on x86, this defaults to endian='LITTLE'
. If you are
reading big endian data (mostly old PowerPC/6800-based files), you
have to set endian='BIG'
accordingly.
You can write RAW files in a similar way, but be advised that in most cases, a more expressive format is better and should be used instead.
If you have an open file-like object, soundfile.read() can open it just like regular files:
import soundfile as sf
with open('filename.flac', 'rb') as f:
data, samplerate = sf.read(f)
Here is an example using an HTTP request:
import io
import soundfile as sf
from urllib.request import urlopen
url = "http://tinyurl.com/shepard-risset"
data, samplerate = sf.read(io.BytesIO(urlopen(url).read()))
Note that the above example only works with Python 3.x. For Python 2.x support, replace the third line with:
from urllib2 import urlopen
Chunks of audio, i.e. bytes, can also be read and written without touching the filesystem. In the following example OGG is converted to WAV entirely in memory (without writing files to the disk):
import io
import soundfile as sf
def ogg2wav(ogg: bytes):
ogg_buf = io.BytesIO(ogg)
ogg_buf.name = 'file.ogg'
data, samplerate = sf.read(ogg_buf)
wav_buf = io.BytesIO()
wav_buf.name = 'file.wav'
sf.write(wav_buf, data, samplerate)
wav_buf.seek(0) # Necessary for `.read()` to return all bytes
return wav_buf.read()
For some audio formats, you can control the bitrate and compression level.
compression_level is a float between 0 and 1, with 1 being the highest compression, and bitrate_mode is 'VARIABLE', 'CONSTANT', or 'AVERAGE'.
import soundfile as sf
# for example, this uncompressed 5 minute wav file with 32 kHz sample rate is 18 Mb
data, samplerate = sf.read('5min_32kHz.wav')
# maximum mp3 compression results in 1.1 Mb file, with either CONSTANT or VARIABLE bit rate
sf.write('max_compression_vbr.mp3', data, samplerate, bitrate_mode='VARIABLE', compression_level=.99)
sf.write('max_compression_cbr.mp3', data, samplerate, bitrate_mode='CONSTANT', compression_level=.99)
# minimum mp3 compression results in 3.5 Mb file
sf.write('min_compression_vbr.mp3', data, samplerate, bitrate_mode='VARIABLE', compression_level=0)
Writing to OGG files can result in empty files with certain versions of libsndfile. See #130 for news on this issue.
If using a Buildroot style system, Python has trouble locating libsndfile.so
file, which causes python-soundfile to not be loaded. This is apparently a bug in python. For the time being, in soundfile.py
, you can remove the call to _find_library
and hardcode the location of the libsndfile.so
in _ffi.dlopen
. See #258 for discussion on this issue.
- 2013-08-27 V0.1.0 Bastian Bechtold:
- Initial prototype. A simple wrapper for libsndfile in Python
- 2013-08-30 V0.2.0 Bastian Bechtold:
- Bugfixes and more consistency with PySoundCard
- 2013-08-30 V0.2.1 Bastian Bechtold:
- Bugfixes
- 2013-09-27 V0.3.0 Bastian Bechtold:
- Added binary installer for Windows, and context manager
- 2013-11-06 V0.3.1 Bastian Bechtold:
- Switched from distutils to setuptools for easier installation
- 2013-11-29 V0.4.0 Bastian Bechtold:
- Thanks to David Blewett, now with Virtual IO!
- 2013-12-08 V0.4.1 Bastian Bechtold:
- Thanks to Xidorn Quan, FLAC files are not float32 any more.
- 2014-02-26 V0.5.0 Bastian Bechtold:
- Thanks to Matthias Geier, improved seeking and a flush() method.
- 2015-01-19 V0.6.0 Bastian Bechtold:
A big, big thank you to Matthias Geier, who did most of the work!
- Switched to
float64
as default data type. - Function arguments changed for consistency.
- Added unit tests.
- Added global read(), write(), blocks() convenience functions.
- Documentation overhaul and hosting on readthedocs.
- Added
'x'
open mode. - Added tell() method.
- Added
__repr__()
method.
- Switched to
- 2015-04-12 V0.7.0 Bastian Bechtold:
Again, thanks to Matthias Geier for all of his hard work, but also Nils Werner and Whistler7 for their many suggestions and help.
- Renamed
import pysoundfile
toimport soundfile
. - Installation through pip wheels that contain the necessary libraries for OS X and Windows.
- Removed
exclusive_creation
argument to write(). - Added truncate() method.
- Renamed
- 2015-10-20 V0.8.0 Bastian Bechtold:
Again, Matthias Geier contributed a whole lot of hard work to this release.
- Changed the default value of
always_2d
fromTrue
toFalse
. - Numpy is now optional, and only loaded for
read
andwrite
. - Added SoundFile.buffer_read() and SoundFile.buffer_read_into() and SoundFile.buffer_write(), which read/write raw data without involving Numpy.
- Added info() function that returns metadata of a sound file.
- Changed the argument order of the write() function from
write(data, file, ...)
towrite(file, data, ...)
And many more minor bug fixes.
- Changed the default value of
- 2017-02-02 V0.9.0 Bastian Bechtold:
Thank you, Matthias Geier, Tomas Garcia, and Todd, for contributions for this release.
- Adds support for ALAC files.
- Adds new member
__libsndfile_version__
- Adds number of frames to
info
class - Adds
dtype
argument tobuffer_*
methods - Deprecates
ctype
argument tobuffer_*
methods - Adds official support for Python 3.6
And some minor bug fixes.
- 2017-11-12 V0.10.0 Bastian Bechtold:
Thank you, Matthias Geier, Toni Barth, Jon Peirce, Till Hoffmann, and Tomas Garcia, for contributions to this release.
- Should now work with cx_freeze.
- Several documentation fixes in the README.
- Removes deprecated
ctype
argument in favor ofdtype
inbuffer_*()
. - Adds SoundFile.frames in favor of now-deprecated
__len__()
. - Improves performance of blocks() and SoundFile.blocks().
- Improves import time by using CFFI's out of line mode.
- Adds a build script for building distributions.
- 2022-06-02 V0.11.0 Bastian Bechtold:
Thank you, tennies, Hannes Helmholz, Christoph Boeddeker, Matt Vollrath, Matthias Geier, Jacek Konieczny, Boris Verkhovskiy, Jonas Haag, Eduardo Moguillansky, Panos Laganakos, Jarvy Jarvison, Domingo Ramirez, Tim Chagnon, Kyle Benesch, Fabian-Robert Stöter, Joe Todd
- MP3 support
- Adds binary wheels for macOS M1
- Improves compatibility with macOS, specifically for M1 machines
- Fixes file descriptor open for binary wheels on Windows and Python 3.5+
- Updates libsndfile to v1.1.0
- Adds get_strings method for retrieving all metadata at once
- Improves documentation, error messages and tests
- Displays length of very short files in samples
- Supports the file system path protocol (pathlib et al)
- 2023-02-02 V0.12.0 Bastian Bechtold
Thank you, Barabazs, Andrew Murray, Jon Peirce, for contributions to this release.
- Updated libsndfile to v1.2.0
- Improves precompiled library location, especially with py2app or cx-freeze.
- Now provide binary wheels for Linux x86_64
- Now prefers packaged libsndfile over system-installed libsndfile
- 2023-02-15 V0.12.1 Bastian Bechtold
Thank you, funnypig, for the bug report
- Fixed typo on library location detection if no packaged lib and no system lib was found