pymad - a Python wrapper for the MPEG Audio Decoder library MAD is available at http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/ Access this module via "import mad" or "from mad import *". To decode an mp3 stream, you'll want to create a MadFile object and read data from that. You can then write the data to a sound device. See the example program in test/ for a simple mp3 player that uses libao for the sound device. This wrapper isn't as low level as the C MAD API is, for example, you don't have to concern yourself with fixed point conversion -- this was done to make pymad easy to use. To build, you need the distutils package, availible from http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/download.html (it comes with Python 2.0). Run "python setup.py build" to build and then as root run "python setup.py install". You may need to run the config_unix.py script, passing it a --prefix value if you've installed your mad stuff someplace weird. Alternately, you can just create a file called "Setup" and put in values for mad_include_dir, mad_lib_dir, and mad_libs. The file format for Setup is: key = value with one pair per line.