michael tewner wrote: I don't have much experience with python, but to open a wavfile, you can use snack: http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/ "The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting language such as Tcl/Tk <http://tcl.activestate.com/> or Python <http://www.python.org/>. Using Snack you can create powerful multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack has commands for basic sound handling, such as playback, recording, file and socket I/O." One thing which annoyed me when using snack is that whenever you are using it, you need to open an audio device, even if you just want to read a wavfile. On computers with soundcard which don't support hardware mxing, it is very annoying. A great thing would be to wrap libsndfile to python, but I don't know anything about implementing C extension in Python, so I don't really know how easy it is. Maybe Erik, the creator of libsndfile, have better advice to give ;) Computing simple wavelet tranforms (1d, dyadic wavelet) is trivial even in C, it should be pretty straightforward to implement it with Python. There is the numarray extension, which enables to compute with arrays in a efficient way, a la matlab. In fact, I looked at python a few months ago to see if it could replace matlab as a scientific environment, projects like scipy are promising (http://www.scipy.org/). But right now, python is moving from numeric ( a former fast vector implementation for python) to numarray, which creates a lof of incompatibilities between different python libraries, and made me stay away from switching from matlab to Python, at least for now. Concerning fft, it should be easy to wrap fftw, for example. See for example this link : http://pylab.sourceforge.net/ Right now, *I* have the feeling that the biggest problem of python for numeric computation is the lack of standardization, but it will hopefully change soon(I can't imagine how wonderful it would be to run IronPython with scientific extensions into mono :) ). David