What is it?

pySonic is a Python wrapper around the high performance, cross platform FMOD sound library. You get all the benefits of the FMOD library, but in a Pythonic, object oriented package.

Where can I get it?

Binaries for the current version of pySonic are available for download on our pySonic SourceForge project page.

To build your own binary, you can check out the code in our SourceForge CVS repository, compile it yourself, and link it against the static FMOD lib files included in the FMOD distribution. A distutils setup script makes all this as easy as typing something like:

python setup.py build_ext -i -cmingw32

What's the catch?

pySonic is an open source Python package covered by the MIT license. No catch there. On the other hand, the FMOD library itself is a closed source product with various licensing schemes. But not all hope is lost. If you plan to use FMOD in a product that is not intended to make money and does not make you any money, then you may use FMOD free of charge. See the FMOD website for details.

How do I use it?

The best way to start learning how to use pySonic is to read a short tutorial. After that, you can use the API documentation as a reference.

The following example will give you a taste of using pySonic.

      import pySonic
      import time
      
      def finished_stream(source):
        print 'Stream finished playing'
      
      # initialize the audio environment
      w = pySonic.World()
      
      # create two sources
      src1 = pySonic.Source()
      src2 = pySonic.Source()
      
      # load a sound entirely from disk, stream another from disk
      src1.Sound = pySonic.FileSample('short.wav')
      src2.Sound = pySonic.FileStream('long.mp3')
      
      # position the sources in 3D space
      src1.Position = (-0.5, 0.0, 0.5)
      src2.Position = (0.5, 0.0, 0.5)
      
      # register a callback for when the stream finishes
      src2.SetEndStreamCallback(finished_stream)
      
      # register a callback for when the stream finishes
      src1.Play()
      src2.Play()
      
      # just block while we're playing in this example
      while src1.IsPlaying() or src2.IsPlaying():
        time.sleep(1)

How does it work?

pySonic is written almost entirely in Pyrex. A few raw C functions help support the FMOD callbacks and memory streams. A suite of unit tests cover most of the functions in the package. Check the source code out of our SourceForge CVS repository for more details.

What can/can't it do?

There isn't a one-to-one mapping between FMOD functions and pySonic functions. Many of the FMOD C functions just aren't needed or don't fit in a object oriented Python library. But, roughly speaking, pySonic can be said to support the following FMOD features.

Device and output initialization
Runtime updating and information
File and memory samples
File, memory, and web streams
3D sound
EAX global and channel reverb
Sample and stream playback (wav, aiff, mp3, ogg, etc.)
Music playback (midi, mod, s3m, it, xm, etc.)
Sound recording

pySonic currently does not support the following FMOD features. Look for them in future versions.

CD playback
Digital signal processing
DirectX channel sound effects

If you would like to request a new pySonic feature, use our SourceForge feature tracker. If you would like to contribute code to pySonic, email me.

Are there any bugs?

Of course! View our SourceForge bug tracker for a list of known bugs. Please submit bug reports using the tracker.