Play the contents of a sound retrieved from an url?

Question

I am retrieving the sound from:

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts

and writing it to a WAV file, when i double-click the file the sound plays ok, but when i use the WAVE module from python to open it, it gives me this error:

wave.Error: file does not start with RIFF id

I want to know if there is a way for openning this file, or if it is possible to play the sound without writing it before.

Here is the relevant code:

url = "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=%s&q=%s" % (lang, text)
hrs = {"User-Agent":
       "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7"}

request = urllib.request.Request(url, headers = hrs)
page = urllib.request.urlopen(request)

fname = "Play"+str(int(time.time()))+".wav"
file = open(fname, 'wb')
file.write(page.read())
file.close()

And the code that reads this file is:

INPUT_FRAMES_PER_BLOCK = 1024

wf = wave.open(fname, 'r')

pa = pyaudio.PyAudio()

stream = pa.open(format=pa.get_format_from_width(wf.getsampwidth()),
                 channels=wf.getnchannels(),
                 rate=wf.getframerate(),
                 output=True)

data = wf.readframes(INPUT_FRAMES_PER_BLOCK)

while data != '':
    stream.write(data)
    data = wf.readframes(INPUT_FRAMES_PER_BLOCK)

stream.stop_stream()
stream.close()

pa.terminate()

Thanks in advance! I am using Python 3 BTW.

Answer 1

You have this error because you're trying to play a file that isn't a WAV.

The sound generated by Google Translate is encoded as an MP3.

As for how to play an MP3 sound with Python, I'd recommend you read this StackOverflow question.

(Basically you have to install some library like Pyglet)