title: Using Python to measure audio "loudness"
body: <p>I'm looking to calculate the loudness of a piece of audio using Python — probably by extracting the peak volume of a piece of audio, or possibly using a more accurate measure (RMS?).</p>
  
  <p>What's the best way to do this? I've had a look at <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/" rel="nofollow">pyaudio</a>, but that didn't seem to do what I wanted. What looked good was <a href="http://hans.fugal.net/src/ruby-audio/doc/" rel="nofollow">ruby-audio</a>, as this seemingly has <code>sound.abs.max</code> built into it. </p>
  
  <p>The input audio will be taken from various local MP3 files that are around 30s in duration.</p>