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

• Decode support for the most popular audio codecs
• Demux the most common media container formats
• Read most metadata and tagging formats
• Automatic format and decoder detection
• Provides a set of 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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Symphonia aims to be comparable or better in performance to popular open-source C-based implementations. Currently, Symphonia's decoders are generally +/-15% the performance of ffmpeg. The exact amount will depend strongly on the codec, and which features of the codec are leveraged in the encoding.

These benchmarks compare the single-threaded decoding performance of both Symphonia and FFmpeg with various audio files.

The benchmarks were executed on an Arch Linux system with a Core i7 4790k and 32GB of RAM, for a minimum of 20 runs each. Hyperfine was used to execute the test. The full benchmark script is as follows:

#!/bin/bash
IN="${1@Q}"
hyperfine -m 20 "ffmpeg -threads 1 -benchmark -v 0 -i ${IN} -f null -" "symphonia-play --decode-only ${IN}"

Basic usage examples may be found in symphonia/examples.

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

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 ffmpeg.

The primary author is Philip Deljanov.

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

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

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!