PsychoPy is amazing, but sometimes, it doesn’t want to play nice. Here is an example where I first output a sound with PsychoPy (PTB backend) and then I output a second sound with sounddevice directly. For some reason, this is hanging the interpreter. sounddevice is unable to output a sound after psychopy.
from psychopy import prefs
prefs.hardware["audioLib"] = ["PTB", "sounddevice", "pyo", "pygame"]
prefs.hardware["audioLatencyMode"] = "0"
from psychopy.clock import wait
from psychopy.sound import Sound
sound = Sound(value=1000, volume=1, secs=0.2, hamming=False)
sound.play()
wait(0.5)
import numpy as np
import sounddevice as sd
fs = 44100
times = np.linspace(0, 1, fs, endpoint=True)
signal = np.sin(2 * np.pi * 440 * times)
sd.play(signal, samplerate=fs, mapping=[1, 2], blocking=False)
I understand that mixing backends is uncommon, and mixing psychopy with sounddevice directly is even more uncommon, but it’s still problematic, e.g. for unit test which will start by running test functions which use psychopy and then other test functions which use sounddevice.