pymad is a Python module that allows Python programs to use the MPEG Audio Decoder library. pymad provides a high-level API, similar to the pyogg module, which makes reading PCM data from MPEG audio streams a piece of cake.

MAD is available at http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/

Access this module via import mad. To decode an mp3 stream, you'll want to create a mad.MadFile object and read data from that. You can then write the data to a sound device. See the example program in test/ for a simple mp3 player that uses the python-pyao wrapper around libao for the sound device.

pymad wrapper isn't as low level as the C MAD API is, for example, you don't have to concern yourself with fixed point conversion -- this was done to make pymad easy to use.

import sys

import ao
import mad

mf = mad.MadFile(sys.argv[1])
dev = ao.AudioDevice(0, rate=mf.samplerate())
while 1:
    buf = mf.read()
    if buf is None:  # eof
        break
    dev.play(buf, len(buf))

To build, you need the distutils package, availible from http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/download.html (it comes with Python 2.0). Run "python setup.py build" to build and then as root run "python setup.py install". You may need to run the config_unix.py script, passing it a --prefix value if you've installed your mad stuff someplace weird. Alternately, you can just create a file called "Setup" and put in values for mad_include_dir, mad_lib_dir, and mad_libs. The file format for Setup is:

key = value

with one pair per line.

# python config_unix.py --prefix /usr/local
# python setup.py build
# python setup.py install --prefix /usr/local

Remember to make sure /usr/local/python/site-packages/ is in your Python search path.