Read MP3 in Python 3

You could use librosa:

import librosa
y, sr = librosa.load('your_file.mp3')

Further information: https://github.com/librosa/librosa

To make it easier I'd convert with some tools mp3 to wav, either:

$ ffmpeg -i foo.mp3 -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 1 -ar 44100 -f wav foo.wav
or
$ mpg123 -w foo.wav foo.mp3

Then read the WAV with one of the python WAV libraries. I'd recommend PySoundFile because it works with most generated WAV correctly and installed without issue (as opposed to scikits.audiolab).

Note: Even though scipy.io.wavfile.read() gave me a "WavFileWarning: Unfamiliar format bytes" warning, it also loaded the file properly.

I am considering using FFmpeg as a subprocess. There is a Python wrapper called pyffmpeg, but I had difficulty installing it on my system (OS X 10.7.3).

You may also want to look at the code here for calling FFmpeg as a subprocess from Python: https://github.com/albertz/learn-midi/blob/master/decode.py

Can be done with pydub:

import array
from pydub import AudioSegment
from pydub.utils import get_array_type

sound = AudioSegment.from_file(file=path_to_file)
left = sound.split_to_mono()[0]

bit_depth = left.sample_width * 8
array_type = get_array_type(bit_depth)

numeric_array = array.array(array_type, left._data)