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))

The latest release is available for download at https://pypi.org/project/pymad/ or via pip install pymad. They're replicated on GitHub in the Releases section.

To build locally, the usual python -m build or python -m pip install . works.

The tests require manual interaction (because you want to listen to the decoded output) and requires PyAO on Linux.