I'm developing a program in python that plays audio files from various websites, mostly mp3s. My first thought to play these files was to try streaming them with requests then decoding the chunks, seeking would be some sort of range in the request header.
So I've tried doing some tests with this and ran into some problems converting small chunks of data to the playable form. Before I dig in and try to fix them, I was wondering if streaming is even necessary. Is that how programs like vlc deal with it? How would you go about dealing with it?
I did a lot of google searching and didn't come up with anything useful.
Yes, if you're playing back as you're downloading, streaming is the way to go.
This generally doesn't require any special requests on your part. Simply make a request, decode the data as it comes in, buffer it, and put backpressure on the stream if your buffers are getting full.
What ends up happening is that the TCP window size will be reduced, slowing the speed at which the server transmits to you, until it matches the rate of playback. (In practice, this means that the window slams to zero pretty quickly, then spurts open for a few packets and back to zero again, since internet connections these days are typically much faster than required.)
Now, you still may want to handle ranged requests if you lose your connection. That is, if I'm listening to audio for several minutes and then lose my connection (such as when changing from WiFi to LTE for example), your app can reconnect and request all bytes from the point at which it left off. Browsers do this. It becomes more important when using common HTTP CDNs which are less tolerant of connections that stay open for long periods of time. Typically, if the TCP window size stays at zero for 2 minutes, expect that TCP connection to close.
You might download a copy of Wireshark or some other packet sniffer and watch what happens over the wire while you play one of these HTTP streams in VLC. You'll get a better idea of what's going on under-the-hood.