Cannot terminate `playsound`-process in python, sound keeps playing

Question

I want to play a sound file for a certain period of time and stop playing it after this time period. I used the playsound function of the playsound python module. I created a process with playsound as target (module multiprocessing) in order to be able to terminate this process. Starting the process works fine, sound begins to play. But if I wait e.g. 5 seconds with time.sleep(5) and terminate the process, the sound keeps playing. Here is my code:

import multiprocessing
from playsound import playsound
import time


if __name__ == "__main__":
    p = multiprocessing.Process(target=playsound, args=('my_soundfile.mp3',))
    p.start()
    time.sleep(5)
    p.terminate()

So if I run this code, the sound file starts to play, but it does not stop playing after 5 seconds. The sleep time period does not matter, same problem with other values. If I terminate the process immediately after starting it

p.start()
p.terminate()

the sound file does not start playing, I assume because terminating the process works as intended. But if I do something (e.g. waiting a period of time with time.sleep()) in between, the sound file keeps playing.

I have the idea of using multiprocessing in order to stop the sound file from playing from this post: How to stop audio with playsound module? (I wanted to ask my question as a comment in this post, but I need a reputation of 50 for that...)

I know there are other ways to play a sound file in python, but I want to know why terminating this process does not stop the sound file from playing.

I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 and Python 3.10.6

I would guess that `playsound()` on your platform works by launching a separate sound-playing utility. You have no control over that process, because you have no way of even knowing which process that is. You need to use some other approach that, unlike `playsound`, is actually designed to give you ongoing control over the sound being played - `pygame`, perhaps. — jasonharper, Mar 24 '23 at 14:20
`pyaudio` would be another possible option. That being said, instead of trying to play just 5 seconds of a larger sound file, it would probably be better to make a clip of the source file that is the length you want to play, and then just use that smaller file. From reading the `playsound` docs, it also looks like you could avoid multiprocessing by passing the `block=False` optional parameter to `playsound()` — nigh_anxiety, Mar 24 '23 at 22:06

DerGrillerich · Accepted Answer · 2023-04-02T17:44:25.227

As I want to mark this question as solved, here is the summary so far:

As @jasonharper suggested, the problem here is that playsound() launches another program that plays the sound, terminating the original process won't have any effect on this new process.
Possible solutions for this problem are (from the comments of @nigh_anxiety and @jasonharper):
- use something else like pyaudio (which I did, works fine) or pygame
- Shorten the original soundfile to the length I want it to play (that would work, but too much effort...)

Cannot terminate `playsound`-process in python, sound keeps playing

1 Answers1