shnatsel / symphonia

Pure Rust multimedia format demuxing, tag reading, and audio decoding library

Symphonia

Symphonia is a pure Rust audio decoding and media demuxing library supporting AAC, ALAC, FLAC, MP3, MP4, OGG, Vorbis, and WAV.

Getting Started · Documentation · Examples · Benchmarks

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Features

• Decode support for the most popular audio codecs with support for gapless playback
• Demux the most common media container formats
• Read most metadata and tagging formats
• Automatic format and decoder detection
• Basic audio primitives for manipulating audio data efficiently
• 100% safe Rust
• Minimal dependencies
• Fast with no compromises in performance!

Additionally, planned features include:

• Providing a C API for integration into other languages
• Providing a WASM API for web usage

Roadmap

Support for individual audio codecs and media formats is provided by separate crates. By default, Symphonia enables support for FOSS codecs and formats, but others may be enabled via the features option.

The follow status classifications are used to determine the state of development for each format or codec.

Status	Meaning
-	In work or not started yet.
Good	Many media streams play. Some streams may panic, error, or produce audible glitches. Some features may not be supported.
Great	Most media streams play. Inaudible glitches may be present. Most common features are supported.
Excellent	All media streams play. No audible or inaudible glitches. All required features are supported.

A status of great indicates that major development is complete and that the feature is in a state that would be acceptable for most applications to use. A status of excellent is only assigned after the feature passes all compliance tests. If no compliance tests are freely available, then a status of excellent will be assigned if Symphonia's implementation matches the quality of a reference implementation, or ffmpeg.

Formats (Demuxers)

Format	Status	Feature Flag	Default	Crate
ISO/MP4	Great	isomp4	No	symphonia-format-isomp4
MKV/WebM	-	mkv	Yes	symphonia-format-mkv
OGG	Great	ogg	Yes	symphonia-format-ogg
Wave	Excellent	wav	Yes	symphonia-format-wav

Codecs (Decoders)

Codec	Status	Feature Flag	Default	Crate
AAC-LC	Great	aac	No	symphonia-codec-aac
ALAC	Great	alac	No	symphonia-codec-alac
HE-AAC (AAC+, aacPlus)	-	aac	No	symphonia-codec-aac
HE-AACv2 (eAAC+, aacPlus v2)	-	aac	No	symphonia-codec-aac
FLAC	Excellent	flac	Yes	symphonia-bundle-flac
MP1	-	mp3	No	symphonia-bundle-mp3
MP2	-	mp3	No	symphonia-bundle-mp3
MP3	Excellent	mp3	No	symphonia-bundle-mp3
Opus	-	opus	Yes	symphonia-codec-opus
PCM	Excellent	pcm	Yes	symphonia-codec-pcm
Vorbis	Great	vorbis	Yes	symphonia-codec-vorbis
WavPack	-	wavpack	Yes	symphonia-codec-wavpack

A symphonia-bundle-* package is a combination of a decoder and a native demuxer.

Tags (Readers)

All metadata readers are provided by the symphonia-metadata crate.

Format	Status
ID3v1	Great
ID3v2	Great
ISO/MP4	Great
RIFF	Great
Vorbis comment (FLAC)	Perfect
Vorbis comment (OGG)	Perfect

Quality

In addition to the safety guarantees afforded by Rust, Symphonia aims to:

• Decode media as correctly as the leading free-and-open-source software decoders
• Prevent denial-of-service attacks
• Be fuzz-tested
• Provide a powerful, consistent, and easy to use API

Performance

Symphonia aims to be comparable to, or faster than, popular open-source C-based implementations. Currently, Symphonia's decoders are generally +/-15% the performance of FFMpeg. However, the exact range will depend strongly on the codec, which features of the codec are being leveraged in the encoding, the Rust compiler version, and the CPU architecture being compiled for.

See the benchmarks for more information.

Examples

Basic usage examples may be found here.

For a more complete application, see symphonia-play, a simple music player.

Tools

Symphonia provides the following tools for debugging purposes:

• symphonia-play for probing, decoding, validating, and playing back media streams.
• symphonia-check for validating Symphonia's decoded output against various decoders.

Author

The primary author is Philip Deljanov.

Special Thanks

• Kostya Shishkov (AAC-LC decoder contribution, see symphonia-codec-aac)

License

Symphonia is provided under the MPL v2.0 license. Please refer to the LICENSE file for more details.

Contributing

Symphonia is an open-source project and contributions are very welcome! If you would like to make a large contribution, please raise an issue ahead of time to make sure your efforts fit into the project goals, and that there's no duplication of effort. Please be aware that all contributions must also be licensed under the MPL v2.0 license to be accepted.

When submitting a pull request, be sure you have included yourself in the CONTRIBUTORS file!