17

A Sound object can be programmatically played using EmitSound. Example:

snd = ExampleData[{"Sound", "AltoFlute"}];

Button["Play!", EmitSound[snd]]

What about an Audio object?

Szabolcs
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    As a version 10 user I don't get it: why is there both Audio and Sound in v11? Is this a case of oops, we didn't plan well with Sound so let's try again with Audio or is there a completely different application that requires a different container? – Mr.Wizard Oct 07 '16 at 14:26
  • Audio[] can do out-of-core stuff, e.g. Audio["http://exampledata.wolfram.com/bach.mp3"], Why Sound[] was not modified to have that ability as well, I dunno... – J. M.'s missing motivation Oct 07 '16 at 14:28
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    @MrW Audio is supposed to be more like Image. It is highly optimized and atomic. Sound can't really be made atomic as it is meant to hold either wave or midi data and it is meant to be dissected by users. More importantly, Audio supports out-of-core processing. We can have Audio[File[...]] which won't load all the data into memory. Applying a filter to it produces another file-backed object. – Szabolcs Oct 07 '16 at 14:29
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    @MrW However, in my tests Audio filters are much slower than the equivalent filter in the open source Audacity, so I think it has a long way to go. – Szabolcs Oct 07 '16 at 14:31
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    @Szabolcs I have a same confusion with @Mr.Wizard ,Why the W.R. make a new Audio but not refine the old Sound?And it's seem the Mathematica process the Audio file which have a same size with Image is lower efficiency. – yode Oct 09 '16 at 18:51

2 Answers2

11

The following resulted from a lot of spelunking and reading the code of Audio`Play.

au = ExampleData[{"Audio", "Bird"}];

Audio`Internals`Execute[
 Audio`Internals`GetAudioManager[
  Audio`AudioInformation[au, "AudioID"]],
 "Play"
 ]

Audio`Play does the same thing except it gets the "AudioID" in a different way which appears to fail.

There are many other commands that can be executed, e.g. "Stop", "Pause", etc. See the definition of Audio`Internals`Execute.

If the audio object is being displayed in the notebook, the seekbar will start moving on playback.

Warning: This is undocumented functionality. I was doing spelunking in M11.0.1 and Audio was introduced in 11.0.0. I expect that the Audio stuff is still under heavy development. I won't be surprised at all if the above stops working in the next version of Mathematica.

J. M.'s missing motivation
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Szabolcs
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  • You mean Audio`Play work? – yode Oct 07 '16 at 15:57
  • @yode No it won't work because insetad of Audio`AudioInformation[au, "AudioID"] it does "AudioID" /. Options[au], which fails. – Szabolcs Oct 07 '16 at 18:29
  • @Szabolcs If I start it playing this way is there a way to get the current time index dynamically as it plays? I tried using Audio`Internals`Execute[ Audio`Internals`GetAudioManager[id], "GetDataPosition"] but no luck. – M.R. Oct 12 '16 at 20:53
  • @M.R. I don't know. – Szabolcs Oct 12 '16 at 21:07
10

You can also use Sound`AudioToSound[] to convert the Audio[] object to a Sound[] object that can then be passed to EmitSound[]:

ExampleData[{"Audio", "Bird"}] // Sound`AudioToSound // EmitSound

Of course, this is only recommended for modestly-sized Audio[] objects.

J. M.'s missing motivation
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