Playing a mp3 stream with python

Last Update: 07.06.2010. By azarai in python | snipplet

I listen to web radios aka music streams alot and usually do not really care how the players work. But recently i got somehow curious about how to play a mp3 stream with python. And it should run on my windows box. That made my search a bit difficult. But i found a solution, the GStreamer lib. It has python bindings and windows builds, hurray. But actually it didn’t look like it would be a simple 1 minute installation and it wasn’t. To save you the time, i wrote this summary of my installation.

BTW if you found a better module for this task, preferably with less dependencies, i’d be happy to hear it :-)

Required libs

• Python 2.6 (i assume you have it already installed :-) )
• GStreamer
• PyGTk, somehow GStreamer needs it…

Steps for setting up the required libaries on Windows

• Download the GStreamer Windows Build and SDK
• Install them (Runtime first, SDK second)
• Download GTK+ Windows. I did use 2.16
• Install it
• Add the <gtk_folder>\bin to your PATH envrionment variable
• download and install PyGTk 2.16 for python 2.6
• download and install PyCairo 1.8 for python 2.6
• download and install PyGObject 2.20 for python 2.6
• Use this Script to verfiy PyGTK was installed successfully

If you use a different gtk+ version, make sure gtk+ and the python bindings versions match.

The Code with comments

Now we have everything set up and can finally write our first code to play a mp3 stream. I’ll just post the code with comments inside.

import pygst
pygst.require("0.10")
import gst

def on_tag(bus, msg):
    taglist = msg.parse_tag()
    print 'on_tag:'
    for key in taglist.keys():
        print '\t%s = %s' % (key, taglist[key])

#our stream to play
music_stream_uri = 'http://mp3channels.webradio.antenne.de/chillout'

#creates a playbin (plays media form an uri) 
player = gst.element_factory_make("playbin", "player")

#set the uri
player.set_property('uri', music_stream_uri)

#start playing
player.set_state(gst.STATE_PLAYING)

#listen for tags on the message bus; tag event might be called more than once
bus = player.get_bus()
bus.enable_sync_message_emission()
bus.add_signal_watch()
bus.connect('message::tag', on_tag)

#wait and let the music play
raw_input('Press enter to stop playing...')

Happy hacking :-)