You can convert MP3 directly to WAV in Python. In this article we’ll use a Python 3 to do the conversion. For this tutorial, any file will work.

To start, first install ffmpeg. ffmpeg is a free program for audio, video and multimedia processing. The program has a console interface, but except from installing it there’s not much neccessary.

Related course: Complete Python Programming Course & Exercises

Example

Pydub

Install the module pydub. This is an audio manipulation module for Python. This module can open many multimedia audio and video formats. You can install this module with pip.

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pip install pydub

If you have not installed ffmpeg yet, install it. You can use your package manager to do that.

For Ubuntu / Debian Linux:

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apt-get install ffmpeg

MP3 to WAV conversion

You can convert an mp3 file (src) to a wav file (dst) by changing the variable names.

The mp3 file must exist in the same directory as the program (.py). If you want to use custom directories, add a path to the filename.

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from os import path
from pydub import AudioSegment

# files                                                                         
src = "transcript.mp3"
dst = "test.wav"

# convert wav to mp3                                                            
sound = AudioSegment.from_mp3(src)
sound.export(dst, format="wav")

The program above uses the module pydub to do the conversion. That module uses ffmpeg itself, meaning ffmpeg must be installed for this to succeed.

Run with:

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python3 convert.py

Wait for the program the complete.

You should have another file in your directory:

convert mp3 to wav

Download audio examples