Question

I do not understand the example material for pyaudio. It seems they had written an entire small program and it threw me off.

How do I just play a single audio file?

Format is not an issue, I just want to know the bare minimum code I need to play an audio file.

Answer 1

The example seems pretty clear to me. You simply save the example as playwav.py call:

python playwav.py my_fav_wav.wav

The wave example with some extra comments:

import pyaudio
import wave
import sys

# length of data to read.
chunk = 1024

# validation. If a wave file hasn't been specified, exit.
if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print "Plays a wave file.\n\n" +\
          "Usage: %s filename.wav" % sys.argv[0]
    sys.exit(-1)

'''
************************************************************************
      This is the start of the "minimum needed to read a wave"
************************************************************************
'''
# open the file for reading.
wf = wave.open(sys.argv[1], 'rb')

# create an audio object
p = pyaudio.PyAudio()

# open stream based on the wave object which has been input.
stream = p.open(format =
                p.get_format_from_width(wf.getsampwidth()),
                channels = wf.getnchannels(),
                rate = wf.getframerate(),
                output = True)

# read data (based on the chunk size)
data = wf.readframes(chunk)

# play stream (looping from beginning of file to the end)
while data:
    # writing to the stream is what *actually* plays the sound.
    stream.write(data)
    data = wf.readframes(chunk)


# cleanup stuff.
wf.close()
stream.close()    
p.terminate()