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Have you ever wanted to work with audio data in Python? I know I do. I want to record from the microphone, I want to play sounds. I want to read and write audio files. If you ever tried this in Python, you know it is kind of a pain.

It's not for a lack of libraries though. There are plenty of those. But when I record from the microphone, I want to get a Numpy array, not bytes. You know, something I can work with! And then I want to directly throw that array into a sound file, or play it on a different sound card, or do some calculations on it!

So one fateful day, I was sufficiently frustrated with the state of things that I set out to create a set of libraries that made that really easy and pythonic. read more…

Having been enamoured with Emacs for the last few years, it makes sense to blog with Emacs as well. Besides, I am kind of fed up with the many conflicting flavors of Markdown out there and have switched my personal note-taking to Org mode long ago. So let's set up Emacs and Org as a blogging platform!

Before we start though, a short disclaimer: This will be a very bare bones blogging engine. It will consist of some articles, a front page, an archive page, and an RSS feed. And you will have to manage the front page and RSS feed semi-manually. No tags, no fancy history. Just what you see here.

On the plus side, this will be implemented entirely within Emacs and very simple to understand. Writing a new blog post will be as simple as writing an Org file and hitting a key combination! And you will get all of Org's fancy syntax highlighting and export magic for free! read more…

For the record, Matplotlib is awesome! Its output looks amazing, it is extremely configurable and very easy to use. What more could you want?

Well… speed. If there is one thing I could criticize about Matplotlib, it is its relative slowness. To measure that, lets make a very simple line plot and draw some random numbers as quickly as possible: read more…

Why would you want to use Python over Matlab?

• Because Python is free and Matlab is not.
• Because Python is a general purpose programming language and Matlab is not.

Let me qualify that a bit. Matlab is a very useful programming environment for numerical problems. For a very particular set of problems, Matlab is an awesome tool. For many other problems however, it is just about unusable. For example, you would not write a complex GUI program in Matlab, you would not write your blogging engine in Matlab and you would not write a web service in Matlab. You can do all that and more in Python. read more…

Wouldn't it be nice if you could do real time audio processing in a convenient programming language? Matlab comes to mind as a convenient language for signal processing. But while Matlab is pretty fast, it is really only fast for algorithms that can be vectorized. In audio however, we have many algorithms that need knowledge about the previous sample to calculate the next one, so they can't be vectorized.

But this is not going to be about Matlab. This is going to be about Python. Combine Python with Numpy (and Scipy and Matplotlib) and you have a signal processing system very comparable to Matlab. Additionally, you can do real-time audio input/output using PyAudio. PyAudio is a wrapper around PortAudio and provides cross platform audio recording/playback in a nice, pythonic way. (Real time capabilities were added in 0.2.6 with the help of yours truly). read more…

Since we moved, our Apple TV has been giving us trouble: we would rent a movie on the Apple TV, and instead of playing it, the Apple TV would just display

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