Stream.read blocks until audio is playing

[jangxx]

When creating a stream with as_loopback=True, the read method on the created stream will block until audio is being played. I'm not sure if this is the desired behavior, but it's certainly unexpected for me. I would suggest the read method to instead just return silence, instead of blocking until data is available.

This blog post mentions this problem, with the solution of running an application which just outputs silence, but I don't think this is a particularly useful solution for a library.

[intxcc]

Thank you for that suggestion!
Did not think much about that as it was never a problem for me.

I will see if I can implement the first solution you suggested.

Best,
Marvin

[Nufflee]

This would be very useful. Hopefully it's implemented soon. +1

[intxcc]

The silence isn't perfect yet, but there you go.
Moved this in an extra branch, as long as it has some issues.
PyAudio-0.2.11.win-amd64-py3.7.msi.zip

[intxcc]

Usage

stream = p.open(format = pyaudio.paInt16,
                channels = channelcount,
                rate = int(device_info["defaultSampleRate"]),
                input = True,
                frames_per_buffer = defaultframes,
                input_device_index = device_info["index"],
                as_loopback = useloopback,
                wasapi_fill_silence = True)

[intxcc]

Or instead of silence I could return NULL when the loopback output stream has no frames available.
One would then be able to handle this case oneself in the python code, as the operation will then be non-blocking.

[jangxx]

Sounds like a great idea, but this would make the loopback streams a special edge case, which don't always return audio like all the other streams. Considering the loopback streams are special anyway however, I think both ways would be fine from a design perspective and having an specific return value for when no audio is available could be useful I guess.

[tavin-inc]

I downloaded this version with wasapi_fill_silence but it's giving me an error in init(), saying that this parameter doesn't exist

[mikhailTochilin]

Could you please drop the .wheel package of this version with wasapi?