I am using pyaudio to record sounds on my Mac BigSur 11.6 (20G165). Specifically, I'm redirecting sound from an application to the input using BlackHole, which works fine.
It usually works fine but, sometimes, I get this error in the Terminal:
||PaMacCore (AUHAL)|| Error on line 2500: err='-10863', msg=Audio Unit: cannot do in current context
Any idea why or how I could prevent it from happening (like, waiting until PaMacCore is ready to record again or something)?
I already tried reinstalling but it doesn't help
brew install portaudio
or
brew install portaudio --HEAD
Here's my code:
import pyaudio
import wave
class Recorder(object):
def __init__(self, fname, mode, channels,
rate, frames_per_buffer):
self.fname = fname
self.mode = mode
self.channels = channels
self.rate = rate
self.frames_per_buffer = frames_per_buffer
self._pa = pyaudio.PyAudio()
self.wavefile = self._prepare_file(self.fname, self.mode)
self._stream = None
def __enter__(self):
return self
def __exit__(self, exception, value, traceback):
self.close()
def record(self, duration):
# Use a stream with no callback function in blocking mode
self._stream = self._pa.open(format=pyaudio.paInt16,
channels=self.channels,
rate=self.rate,
input=True,
frames_per_buffer=self.frames_per_buffer)
for _ in range(int(self.rate / self.frames_per_buffer * duration)):
audio = self._stream.read(self.frames_per_buffer)
self.wavefile.writeframes(audio)
return None
def start_recording(self):
# Use a stream with a callback in non-blocking mode
self._stream = self._pa.open(format=pyaudio.paInt16,
channels=self.channels,
rate=self.rate,
input=True,
frames_per_buffer=self.frames_per_buffer,
stream_callback=self.get_callback())
self._stream.start_stream()
return self
def stop_recording(self):
self._stream.stop_stream()
return self
def get_callback(self):
def callback(in_data, frame_count, time_info, status):
self.wavefile.writeframes(in_data)
return in_data, pyaudio.paContinue
return callback
def close(self):
self._stream.close()
self._pa.terminate()
self.wavefile.close()
def _prepare_file(self, fname, mode='wb'):
wavefile = wave.open(fname, mode)
wavefile.setnchannels(self.channels)
wavefile.setsampwidth(self._pa.get_sample_size(pyaudio.paInt16))
wavefile.setframerate(self.rate)
return wavefile
Usage example:
recfile = Recorder(filename, 'wb', 2, 44100, 1024)
recfile.start_recording()
...
recfile.stop_recording()
Apparently the problem were mismatched bitrates in BlackHole's aggregated output device. I was aggregating Blackhole's output (44,1kHz) and the Mac Speakers (48kHz). This did not cause any consistent bad behaviour but sometimes led to these errors.