Finding the length of an mp3 file

Question

So i have the code:

import glob,os
import random


path = 'C:\\Music\\'
aw=[]
for infile in glob.glob( os.path.join(path,'*.mp3') ):
    libr = infile.split('Downloaded',1)



    aw.append(infile)
aww = -1
while 1:
    aww += 1
    print len(aw),aww

    random.shuffle(aw)
    awww = aw[aww]
    os.startfile(awww)

but all it does is go through all of the songs without stopping. I thought if I could find the length of the song that is currently playing, I could use the "time" module to keep going after the song is done with the (sleep) attribute. However, I couldn't find how to get the length of the song on windows. Does anyone know a solution to my probleme?

Your question title is confusing. Perhaps this is part of a shuffle music player, but your problem is finding the length of an mp3 song. Also, your variable names (`aw`, `aww`, `awww`) could be more descriptive ;-) — Gregg, May 17 '11 at 22:48

score 74 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 06 '19 at 09:34

74

You can use mutagen to get the length of the song (see the tutorial):

from mutagen.mp3 import MP3
audio = MP3("example.mp3")
print(audio.info.length)

edited Jul 06 '19 at 09:34

Tomasz Gandor

7,235
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answered May 17 '11 at 22:41

Gregg

3,016
19
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@salks: It should. Extract the archive, `cd` into the directory, and run `python setup.py install` from the command line. – Gregg May 17 '11 at 23:36
RuntimeWarning: Couldn't find ffmpeg or avconv - defaulting to ffmpeg, but may not work warn("Couldn't find ffmpeg or avconv - defaulting to ffmpeg, but may not work", RuntimeWarning) Traceback (most recent call last): File "E:\PythonProjects\testfile.py", line 11, in print(file.info.length) AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'info' – Moses Oct 20 '21 at 10:18

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 12 '15 at 08:21

13

You can use FFMPEG libraries:

    args=("ffprobe","-show_entries", "format=duration","-i",filename)
    popen = subprocess.Popen(args, stdout = subprocess.PIPE)
    popen.wait()
    output = popen.stdout.read()

and the output will be:

[FORMAT]
duration=228.200515
[/FORMAT]

answered Mar 12 '15 at 08:21

Gabriel Furstenheim

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For 10-hour long mp3 files, ffprobe was returning inaccurate results. I had to use mutagen instead. – jippyjoe4 Sep 23 '20 at 05:24
@jippyjoe4: Out of interest, how far out were they? Seconds? Minutes? Worse than that? – hippietrail Apr 29 '21 at 03:34

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 17 '14 at 19:22

You can also get this using eyed3, if that's your flavor by doing:

import eyed3
duration = eyed3.load('path_to_your_file.mp3').info.time_secs

Note however that this uses sampling to determine the length of the track. As a result, if it uses variable bit rate, the samples may not be representative of the whole, and the estimate may be off by a good degree (I've seen these estimates be off by more than 30% on court recordings).

I'm not sure that's much worse than other options, but it's something to remember if you have variable bit rates.

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 28 '20 at 22:49

Newer versions of python-ffmpeg have a wrapper function for ffprobe. An example of getting the duration is like this:

import ffmpeg
print(ffmpeg.probe('in.mp4')['format']['duration']))

Found at: https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python/issues/57#issuecomment-361039924

Albert · Answer 5 · 2014-11-03T14:44:11.797

Maybe do the playing also within Python, i.e. don't use os.startfile, use some Python library to play the file.

I have recently written such a library/module, the musicplayer module (on PyPI). Here is a simple demo player which you can easily extend for your shuffle code.

Just do easy_install musicplayer. Then, here is some example code to get the length:

class Song:
    def __init__(self, fn):
        self.f = open(fn)
    def readPacket(self, bufSize):
        return self.f.read(bufSize)
    def seekRaw(self, offset, whence):
        self.f.seek(offset, whence)
        return self.f.tell()

import musicplayer as mp

songLenViaMetadata = mp.getMetadata(Song(filename)).get("duration", None)
songLenViaAnalyzing = mp.calcReplayGain(Song(filename))[0]

Finding the length of an mp3 file

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