Python's Command-Line Utilities & Music Information Retrieval Tools

The Real Python Podcast

What are the built-in Python modules that can work as useful command-line tools? How can these tools add more functionality to Windows machines? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

Christopher shares an article by Trey Hunner about Python’s extensive collection of command-line utilities? The piece digs into general-purpose tools that format JSON data or start a simple web server and additional utilities for working with your Python code from the terminal.

We cover a set of Jupyter Notebooks for teaching and learning the art of music processing and Music Information Retrieval (MIR). The notebooks are resources for working through the textbook, “Fundamentals of Music Processing: Audio, Analysis, Algorithms, Applications.”

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, a discussion of CRUD operations, a description of Python’s built-in bytes sequence, favorite essays on development and programming, Python resources for working with Excel, and a project for creating finite state machines in Python.

This episode is sponsored by APILayer.

Course Spotlight: Binary, Bytes, and Bitwise Operators in Python

In this course, you’ll learn how to use Python’s bitwise operators to manipulate individual bits of data at the most granular level. With the help of hands-on examples, you’ll see how you can apply bitmasks and overload bitwise operators to control binary data in your code.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:02:21 – Python 3.12.4 Released
• 00:02:52 – Python 3.13.0 Beta 2 Released
• 00:03:01 – PEP 712 Rejected
• 00:04:18 – Django in Action - Mr. Trudeau’s Book has Launched!
• 00:06:23 – What Are CRUD Operations?
• 00:10:12 – Python’s Many Command-Line Utilities
• 00:14:04 – Sponsor: APILayer
• 00:14:55 – Notebooks for Fundamentals of Music Processing
• 00:22:55 – bytes: The Lesser-Known Python Built-in Sequence
• 00:26:57 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:28:34 – Essays on Programming I Think About a Lot
• 00:41:28 – Python Resources for Working With Excel
• 00:46:13 – Python Finite State Machines Made Easy
• 00:50:10 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

• Python 3.12.4 Released – See the full list of changes in this release
• Python 3.13.0 Beta 2 Released
• PEP 712 Rejected – This Python Enhancement Proposal “Adding a ‘converter’ parameter to dataclasses.field” was determined to have an insufficient number of use cases.
• Django in Action

Show Links:

• What Are CRUD Operations? – CRUD operations are the cornerstone of application functionality. Whether you access a database or interact with a REST API, you usually want to create, retrieve, update, and delete data. In this tutorial, you’ll explore how CRUD operations work in practice.
• Python’s Many Command-Line Utilities – This article describes every command-line tool included with Python, each of which can be run with python -m module_name.
• Notebooks for Fundamentals of Music Processing – This is a collection of Python Notebooks for teaching and learning the fundamentals of music processing. Examples include illustrations, sound samples, math, and more.
• bytes: The Lesser-Known Python Built-in Sequence – The bytes data type looks a bit like a string, but it isn’t a string. This article explores it and also looks at the main Unicode encoding, UTF-8

Discussion:

• Essays on Programming I Think About a Lot – A collection of essays on software from a variety of sources. Content includes how to choose your tech stack, products, abstractions, and more.
• Falsehoods programmers believe about time - Infinite Undo
• Falsehoods programmers believe about email
• Falsehoods programmers believe about geography – Thias の blog
• awesome-falsehood: 😱 Falsehoods Programmers Believe In

Projects:

• Python Resources for Working With Excel
• Python Finite State Machines Made Easy

Additional Links:

• SQLite and SQLAlchemy in Python: Move Your Data Beyond Flat Files – Real Python
• Unicode in Python: Working With Character Encodings – Real Python
• Fundamentals of Music Processing - Editions of the Book
• Editing Excel Spreadsheets in Python With openpyxl – Real Python
• My thoughts on Python in Excel
• The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas

Level up your Python skills with our expert-led courses:

• Playing and Recording Sound in Python
• Binary, Bytes, and Bitwise Operators in Python
• Unicode in Python: Working With Character Encodings

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