go-minimp3

go-minimp3 is a Go binding for the minimp3 C library. The following is the minimp3 description from its author, @lieff.

Minimalistic, single-header library for decoding MP3. minimp3 is designed to be small, fast (with SSE and NEON support), and accurate (ISO conformant).

go-minimp3 has a very simple interface, one function and one struct, and has zero external dependencies. However, Cgo must be enabled to compile this package.

Interface

// Decode parses an MP3 byte slice and returns a [Waveform].
func Decode(mp3Data []byte) (*Waveform, error)

// Waveform represents decoded PCM audio data. 🎶
type Waveform struct {
 // Channels is the number of audio channels (e.g., 1 for mono, 2 for stereo).
 Channels int
 // SampleRate is the number of samples per second (e.g., 44100 Hz).
 SampleRate int
 // Samples contains the interleaved audio data.
 Samples []int16
}

// NewReader returns a new [io.Reader] that streams the waveform's data
// as signed 16-bit little-endian PCM.
func (w *Waveform) NewReader() io.Reader

// WriteTo implements the [io.WriterTo] interface, writing the waveform's samples
// to a writer as signed 16-bit little-endian PCM data.
func (w *Waveform) WriteTo(writer io.Writer) (int64, error)

Examples

How to convert an MP3 file to a WAV file using go-audio/wav

Check out examples/mp3-to-wav

How to play an MP3 file using ebitengine/oto

Check out examples/play-mp3

Taskfile.yml

Many useful commands are in two Taskfile.yml files: Taskfile.yml and examples/Taskfile.yml. To run the tasks, you need to install go-task/task, which works similarly to GNU Make.

Dockerfile

Check out the Dockerfile for an example of using golang:1.24 and gcr.io/distroless/base-debian12 to run go-minimp3 with Cgo enabled.

docker build -t cowork-ai/go-minimp3 .
cat ./testdata/44khz128kbps.mp3 | docker run --rm -i cowork-ai/go-minimp3 | ffplay -autoexit -i pipe:

Note that the gcr.io/distroless/static-debian12 image does not work because it lacks glibc.