Set output device for pygame mixer

Question

I need to play audio files through different audio devices using pygame. Apparently this is possible by parameter devicename in method pygame.mixer.init(), but there is no documentation for it.

My questions:

1- How to set output device for pygame mixer (or channel/sound if possible)?

2- How to list all available device-names?

Answer 1

I found the solution. Pygame v2 has made all of this possible. Since pygame uses sdl2, we can get audio device names by pygame's own implementation of the sdl2 library.

Updated method

On the recent versions of pygame;

To get the audio device names:

import pygame
import pygame._sdl2.audio as sdl2_audio

def get_devices(capture_devices: bool = False) -> Tuple[str, ...]:
    init_by_me = not pygame.mixer.get_init()
    if init_by_me:
        pygame.mixer.init()
    devices = tuple(sdl2_audio.get_audio_device_names(capture_devices))
    if init_by_me:
        pygame.mixer.quit()
    return devices

And to play an audio file through a specific device:

from time import sleep
import pygame

def play(file_path: str, device: Optional[str] = None):
    if device is None:
        devices = get_devices()
        if not devices:
            raise RuntimeError("No device!")
        device = devices[0]
    print("Play: {}\r\nDevice: {}".format(file_path, device))
    pygame.mixer.init(devicename=device)
    pygame.mixer.music.load(file_path)
    pygame.mixer.music.play()
    try:
        while True:
            sleep(0.1)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        pass
    pygame.mixer.quit()

Old method

On the earlier versions of pygame v2;

To get the audio device names:

import pygame._sdl2 as sdl2

pygame.init()
is_capture = 0  # zero to request playback devices, non-zero to request recording devices
num = sdl2.get_num_audio_devices(is_capture)
names = [str(sdl2.get_audio_device_name(i, is_capture), encoding="utf-8") for i in range(num)]
print("\n".join(names))
pygame.quit()

On my device, the code returns:

HDA Intel PCH, 92HD87B2/4 Analog
HDA Intel PCH, HDMI 0
C-Media USB Headphone Set, USB Audio

And to set the output audio device for pygame mixer:

import pygame
import time

pygame.mixer.pre_init(devicename="HDA Intel PCH, 92HD87B2/4 Analog")
pygame.mixer.init()
pygame.mixer.music.load("audio.ogg")
pygame.mixer.music.play()
time.sleep(10)
pygame.mixer.quit()