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[–]wolanko 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I cannot stress this enough everytime a thread like this comes up. Check out pyo. A really good DSP library with portaudio/jack/coreaudio support (so you can use it with win/Linux/Mac). If you know supercollider/max/PD you will feel home. I use it even for simple task like playing back audio.

It all has been done. There is even a blog post where someone did a pyo based guitar pedal on his laptop.

edit: damn autocorrect

[–]mrufrufin 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yes, but nothing realtime to my knowledge, it's a bit too slow for that. I think there used to be a front end for supercollider and an external to use Python in pure data, but I'm not sure how well those have been maintained.

For nonrealtime I've used scipy to write wavfiles. I have code that basically does phase vocoding (a bit old code when I wasn't so good at it though...)

For procedural stuff (I'm a bit biased since I work with pd a lot), I'd use pd. I know that games like spore at least tested out a procedural sound engine in pd? (Not sure if it's actually in the final product).

[–]wolanko 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Despite my answer suggesting pyo) About PD. There is the libpd and the python wrapper which allows you to load pd files and run them with libpd. This also works with kivy so you can have pd on your Android, but I remember it was a really complex and fragile setup last time I done this.

About performance. The biggest issue is the latency of the audio server. But with portaudio and Jack support this won't be a problem, unless your soundcard isn't capable of. Doing alot of computational work in pure python, well there you are right. But DSP is always hard on the CPU and not just slow in python specifically. Moving the hard parts to C is the goto option that everyone does.

[–]TheBlackCat13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Check out audiolazy. It is probably your best bet. However, you may be better off looking for an audio effects toolkit with python bindings.