This page is divided in three sections: Music software written in Python, Music programming in Python, and Music software supporting Python

Music software written in Python

Audio Players

• Bluemindo - Bluemindo is a really simple but powerful audio player in Python/PyGTK, using Gstreamer. Bluemindo is a free (as in freedom) software, released under GPLv3, only.

• cplay - a curses front-end for various audio players

• edna - an MP3 server, edna allows you to access your MP3 collection from any networked computer. The web pages are dynamically constructed, adjusting to directory structure and the files in those directories. This is much nicer than using simple directory indexing. Rather than directly serving up an MP3, the software serves up a playlist. This gets passed to your player (e.g. WinAmp) which turns around with an HTTP request to stream the MP3.

• Listen - Music management and playback for GNOME

• MediaCore Audio/Podcast Player and CMS - Web based CMS for music management in video, audio and podcast form. All audio, video, and podcasts added to the system are playable from any browser.

• MMA - Musical Midi Accompaniment. If you follow the above link you will find that Pymprovisator is no longer developed due to the fact that there is this similar, but more powerful GPL Python software.

• Peyote - Peyote is an audio player with friendly MC-like interface. Peyote is designed specifically for work easy with cue sheets.

• Pymprovisator - Pymprovisator is a program that emulates the program Band in a Box from PG Music. You can think in it like the electronic version of the books+CD from Jamey Aebersold. You set the basic parameters in a song: title, style, key, chords sequence,... and the program will generate a Midi file with the correct accompaniment. (dev suspended)

• Pymps - Pymps is the PYthon Music Playing System - a web based mp3/ogg jukebox. It's written in Python and utilises the PostgreSQL database.

• MusicPlayer - MusicPlayer is a high-quality music player implemented in Python, using FFmpeg and PortAudio.

• Pymserv - PyMServ is a graphical client for mserv, a music server. It is written in Python using pygtk and gconf to store prefs.

• Pytone - Pytone is a music jukebox written in Python with a curses based GUI. While providing advanced features like crossfading and multiple players, special emphasis is put on ease of use, turning PyTone into an ideal jukebox system for use at parties.

• Quod Libet - Quod Libet is a GTK+-based audio player written in Python. It lets you make playlists based on regular expressions. It lets you display and edit any tags you want in the file. And it lets you do this for all the file formats it supports -- Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, Musepack, and MOD.

• TheTurcanator - a small midi piano tutor for windows and mac. Includes CoreMIDI wrapper written in pyrex.

• LinuxBand - LinuxBand is a GUI front-end for MMA (Musical MIDI Accompaniment). Type in the chords, choose the groove and LinuxBand will play a musical accompaniment for you.

Audio Convertors

• audio-convert-mod - audio-convert-mod is a simple audio file converter that supports many formats. At just a right-click, you can convert any amount of music files to WAV, MP3, AAC, Ogg and more. audio-convert-mod was designed with the same principles as fwbackups - keeping things simple.

• SoundConverter - SoundConverter is a simple audio file converter for the GNOME desktop, using GStreamer for conversion. It can read anything GStreamer has support for, and writes to WAV, MP3, AAC, Ogg or FLAC files.

• Python Audio Tools - Python audio tools are a collection of audio handling programs which work from the command line. These include programs for CD extraction, track conversion from one audio format to another, track renaming and retagging, track identification, CD burning from tracks, and more. Supports internationalized track filenames and metadata using Unicode. Works with high-definition, multi-channel audio as well as CD-quality. Track conversion uses multiple CPUs or CPU cores if available to greatly speed the transcoding process. Track metadata can be retrieved from FreeDB, MusicBrainz or compatible servers. Audio formats supported are: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Apple Lossless, Shorten, WavPack, MP3, MP2, M4A, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg FLAC, & Sun AU

Music Notation

• Abjad - Abjad is a Python API for Formalized Score Control. Abjad is designed to help composers build up complex pieces of music notation in an iterative and incremental way. You can use Abjad to create a symbolic representation of all the notes, rests, staves, nested rhythms, beams, slurs and other notational elements in any score. Because Abjad wraps the powerful LilyPond music notation package, you can use Abjad to control extremely fine-grained typographic details of all elements of any score.

• Frescobaldi - is a LilyPond music score editor written in Python using PyQt4 and PyKDE4. Clicking a button runs LilyPond on the current document and displays the PDF in a preview window. There are some nice editing tools and a powerful score wizard to quickly setup a template score.

• mingus - mingus is an advanced music theory and notation package for Python. It can be used to play around with music theory, to build editors, educational tools and other applications that need to process music. It can also be used to create sheet music with LilyPond and do automated musicological analysis.

• Kodou - Kodou is a small package for algorithmic music notation which runs on top of the LilyPond compiler. It has been designed with the goal of being as minimalistic as possible, yet allowing creation of complex musical structures. It's public API consists of only two objects: a class Part (representing a musical line which itself could be mono- or polyphonic) and a main processing function kodou. Kodou's main strength however lies in it's treatment of time: rhythm is not constructed dependent on duration, but from points (notes/chords) alongside of a timeline and as such as a function of time. Setting variant durations other than the ones imposed by Kodou is possible.

• Partitura - Partitura is a Python package for working with symbolic musical information. It supports loading from and exporting to MusicXML and MIDI files. It also supports loading from Humdrum kern and MEI. It is designed to be light-weight and flexible.

• see also 'music21' below

Musical Analysis

• music21 - a toolkit developed at MIT for computational musicology, music theory, and generative composition. Provides expandable objects and methods for most common theoretical problems. Supports music import via MusicXML, Humdrum/Kern, Musedata, ABC, and MIDI, output via MusicXML, Lilypond, and MIDI, and can easily integrate with notation editors (Finale, Sibelius, or MuseScore) and other audio and DAW software (via MIDI).

• pcsets - Pitch Class Sets are a mathematical model for analyzing and composing music.

• PyOracle - Module for Audio Oracle and Factor Oracle Musical Analysis.

• pyHarmonyUI - is a python-based tool designed to provide a series of tools - it is based on an open source lib named pyHarmonyTooling . You may notably guess tonality of a song, work with chords, guess chords from tabs or play with the circle of 5th.

• Xenharmlib - a music theory library for the exploration and research of microtonality, diatonic set theory, non-standard notations, and many more. The library implements a superset of Western classical music theory, so you can also use it to compose and analyze music in the boundaries of the common practice period or 20th century Western music.

• Partitura - Partitura (see also Music Notation) offers a diverse set of music analysis tools, such as estimation of pitch-spelling, meter, key signature, voicing, and tonal tension.

Audio Analysis

• Friture - Friture is a graphical program designed to do time-frequency analysis on audio input in real-time. It provides a set of visualization widgets to display audio data, such as a scope, a spectrum analyser, a rolling 2D spectrogram.

• LibXtract - LibXtract is a simple, portable, lightweight library of audio feature extraction functions. The purpose of the library is to provide a relatively exhaustive set of feature extraction primatives that are designed to be 'cascaded' to create a extraction hierarchies.

• Yaafe - Yet Another Audio Feature Extractor is a toolbox for audio analysis. Easy to use and efficient at extracting a large number of audio features simultaneously. WAV and MP3 files supported, or embedding in C++, Python or Matlab applications.

• Aubio - Aubio is a tool designed for the extraction of annotations from audio signals. Its features include segmenting a sound file before each of its attacks, performing pitch detection, tapping the beat and producing midi streams from live audio.

• LibROSA - A python module for audio and music analysis. It is easy to use, and implements many commonly used features for music analysis.

Ear Training

• GNU Solfege - GNU Solfege is a computer program written to help you practice ear training. It can be useful when practicing the simple and mechanical exercises.

cSound

• athenaCL - modular, polyphonic, poly-paradigm algorithmic music composition in an interactive command-line environment. The athenaCL system is an open-source, cross-platform, object-oriented composition tool written in Python; it can be scripted and embedded, includes integrated instrument libraries, post-tonal and microtonal pitch modeling tools, multiple-format graphical outputs, and musical output in Csound, MIDI, audio file, XML, and text formats.

• Cabel - Visual way to create csound instruments.

• Dex Tracker - Front end for csound that includes a tracker style score editor in a grid, text editor, cabel tested with Python 2.5.

• Ounk is a Python audio scripting environment that uses Csound as it's engine.

• Cecilia is a csound frontend that lets you create your own GUI (grapher, sliders, toggles, popup menus) using a simple syntax. Cecilia comes with a lots of original builtin modules for sound effects and synthesis. Previously written in tcl/tk, Cecilia was entirely rewritten with Python/wxPython and uses the Csound API for communicating between the interface and the audio engine. Version 4.02 beta is the current release.

• see also 'blue' below

Audio (Visual) Programming Frameworks

• Peace Synthesizer Framework - "Peace Synthesizer Framework" is Cross Platform Scriptable Real-Time Visualization & Sound. It has internal and external real-time scriptable visualization and sound generation and also support Nintendo system [Famicom] - like sound Emulation for 8-bits style chiptune music.

• Hypersonic - Hypersonic is for building and manipulating sound processing pipelines. It is designed for real-time control. It includes objects for oscillators, filters, file-io, soundcard and memory operations.

Music programming in Python

Playing & creating sound

• pydub - Pydub is a simple and easy high level interface based on ffmpeg and influenced by jquery. It manipulates audio, adding effects, id3 tags, slicing, concatenating audio tracks. Supports python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3

• Gensound - Gensound, a lightweight and pythonic library for audio processing and synthesis, actively maintained and developed as of 2021. Features include advanced audio editing, audio effects, inputting melodies as strings, parametrization, multi-channel panning, time stretch, sample rate conversion.

• audiere - Audiere is a high-level audio API. It can play Ogg VorbisAU, MP3, FLACAS, uncompressed WAV, AIFF, MOD, S3M, XM, and ITAN files. For audio output, Audiere supports DirectSound or WinMM in Windows, OSS on Linux and Cygwin, and SGI AL on IRIX.

• audiolab - audiolab is a small Python package (now part of scikits) to import data from audio files to numpy arrays and export data from numpy arrays to audio files. It uses libsndfile from Erik Castro de Lopo for the underlying IO, which supports many different audio formats: http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/

• GStreamer Python Bindings - GStreamer is a big multimedia library, it is very simple to use it with these python bindings. Many applications rely on it (Exaile, Pitivi, Jokosher, Listen usw.). Online documentation can be found on http://pygstdocs.berlios.de/

• improviser - Automatic music generation software. Experiments in musical content generation.

• python-musical - Python library for music theory, synthesis, and playback. Contains a collection of audio wave generators and filters powered by numpy. Also contains a pythonic music theory library for handling notes, chords, scales. Can load, save, and playback audio.

• LoopJam - Instant 1 click remixing of sample loops, able to boost your creativity and multiply your sample loop library. Remix audio loops on a slice level, apply up to 9 FX to individual slices or create countless versions using LJ's auto-remix feature (jam) which re-arranges the audio loop forming musical patterns.

• Loris - Loris is an Open Source C++ class library implementing analysis, manipulation, and synthesis of digitized sounds using the Reassigned Bandwidth-Enhanced Additive Sound Model. Loris supports modified resynthesis and manipulations of the model data, such as time- and frequency-scale modification and sound morphing. Loris includes support and wrapper code for building extension modules for various scripting languages (Python, Tcl, Perl).

• MusicKit - The MusicKit is an object-oriented software system for building music, sound, signal processing, and MIDI applications. It has been used in such diverse commercial applications as music sequencers, computer games, and document processors. Professors and students in academia have used the MusicKit in a host of areas, including music performance, scientific experiments, computer-aided instruction, and physical modeling. PyObjC is required to use this library in Python.

• pyao - pyao provides Python bindings for libao, a cross-platform audio output library. It supports audio output on Linux (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, esd), MacOS X, Windows, *BSD and some more. There are ready-to-use packages in Debian/Ubuntu, and Audio output is as easy as: import ao; pcm = ao.AudioDevice("pulse"); pcm.play(data)

• pyAudio - PyAudio provides Python bindings for PortAudio, the cross-platform audio I/O library. Using PyAudio, you can easily use Python to play and record audio on a variety of platforms. Seems to be a successor of fastaudio, a once popular binding for PortAudio

• pyFluidSynth - Python bindings for FluidSynth, a MIDI synthesizer that uses SoundFont instruments. This module contains Python bindings for FluidSynth. FluidSynth is a software synthesizer for generating music. It works like a MIDI synthesizer. You load patches, set parameters, then send NOTEON and NOTEOFF events to play notes. Instruments are defined in SoundFonts, generally files with the extension SF2. FluidSynth can either be used to play audio itself, or you can call a function that returns chunks of audio data and output the data to the soundcard yourself.

• Pygame - Pygame is a set of Python modules designed for writing games. It is written on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the Python language. Pygame is highly portable and runs on nearly every platform and operating system. .ogg .wav .midi .mod .xm .mp3. Sound output. midi input and output. Load sounds into numeric and numpy arrays.

• PyMedia - (Not updated since 2006) PyMedia is a Python module for the multimedia purposes. It provides rich and simple interface for the digital media manipulation( wav, mp3, ogg, avi, divx, dvd, cdda etc ). It includes parsing, demutiplexing, multiplexing, coding and decoding. It can be compiled for Windows, Linux and cygwin.

• pyo - pyo is a Python module containing classes for a wide variety of audio signal processing types. With pyo, user will be able to include signal processing chains directly in Python scripts or projects, and to manipulate them in real time through the interpreter. Tools in pyo module offer primitives, like mathematical operations on audio signal, basic signal processing (filters, delays, synthesis generators, etc.), but also complex algorithms to create sound granulation and others creative audio manipulations. pyo supports OSC protocol (Open Sound Control), to ease communications between softwares, and MIDI protocol, for generating sound events and controlling process parameters. pyo allows creation of sophisticated signal processing chains with all the benefits of a mature, and wildly used, general programming language.

• Zyne - Zyne is a Python modular synthesizer using pyo as its audio engine. Zyne comes with more than 10 builtin modules implementing different kind of synthesis engines and provides a simple API to create your own custom modules.

• Soundgrain - Soundgrain is a graphical interface where users can draw and edit trajectories to control granular sound synthesis modules. Soundgrain is written with Python and WxPython and uses pyo as its audio engine.

• Pyper - (Not updated since early 2005) Pyper is a musical development environment. It allows you to write Python scripts that generates music in real-time. Pyper uses QuickTime Musical Instruments for synthesis.

• pySonic - (Not updated since 2005) pySonic is a Python wrapper around the high performance, cross platform, but closed source, FMOD sound library. You get all the benefits of the FMOD library, but in a Pythonic, object oriented package.

• PySndObj - The Sound Object Library is an object-oriented audio processing library. It provides objects for synthesis and processing of sound that can be used to build applications for computer-generated music. The core code, including soundfile and text input/output, is fully portable across several platforms. Platform-specific code includes realtime audio IO and MIDI input support for Linux (OSS,ALSA and Jack), Windows (MME and ASIO), MacOS X (CoreAudio, but no MIDI at moment), Silicon Graphics (Irix) machines and any Open Sound System-supported UNIX. The SndObj library also exists as Python module, aka PySndObj. The programming principles for Python SndObj programming are similar to the ones used in C++. It is also possible to use the Python interpreter for on-the-fly synthesis programming.

• PySynth - A simple music synthesizer.

• Snack - (last update: December 2005) The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting language such as Tcl/Tk or Python. Using Snack you can create powerful multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack has commands for basic sound handling, such as playback, recording, file and socket I/O. Snack also provides primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech (being developped at the KTH music&speech department), but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also successfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals. The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.

• AudioLazy - Real-Time Expressive Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Package for Python, using any Python iterable as a [-1;1] range audio source. Has time-variant linear filters as well as LTI filters using Z-Transform equations like 1 - z ** -1, as well as analysis (ZCR / zero crossing rate, LPC / Linear Predictive Coding, AMDF, etc.), synthesis (table lookup, ADSR, etc.), ear modeling (Patterson-Holdsworth with gammatone filters and ERB models), and multiple implementation of common filters (lowpass, highpass, comb, resonator), among several other resources (e.g. Lagrange polynomial interpolation, simple converters among MIDI pitch / frequency / string). Works mainly with Stream instances for its signal outputs, a generator-like (lazy) iterable with elementwise/broadcast-style operators similar to the Numpy array operators. Integrated with Matplotlib for LTI filter plotting, although it doesn't require Matplotlib nor Numpy for computation, DSP or I/O. Emphasizes sample-based processing while keeping block-based processing easy to be done, this package can also be seen as a highly enhanced itertools. Pure Python, multiplatform, compatible with Python 2.7 and 3.2+, uses PyAudio for audio I/O (if needed). Can be used together with Scipy, Sympy, music21 and several other packages, none required for DSP computation based on Python iterables.

• sounddevice - This module provides bindings for the PortAudio library (using CFFI) and a few convenience functions to play and record NumPy arrays containing audio signals.

Community

• PythonSound - The Python Sound Project aims to develop a productive community around Python, Csound and other synthesis engines as tools for algorithmic and computer assisted composition of electroacoustic music.

Csound

• CSound / CsoundAC - Csound is a sound and music synthesis system, providing facilities for composition and performance over a wide range of platforms and for any style of music. The Csound orchestra language features over 1200 unit generators (called "opcodes") covering nearly every sound synthesis method and that the user can combine into "instruments" of unlimited complexity and flexibility. Csound 5 allows Python code to be called from or directly embedded into Csound orchestras. Additionally, the csnd Python extension module wraps the Csound API so that Csound can be embedded into Python applications. CsoundAC (for "Csound Algorithmic Composition") is a GUI front end to Csound with Python scripting and a Python module providing tools for the algorithmic generation or manipulation of Csound scores. Csound on Sourceforge;