FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'ffprobe': 'ffprobe'

When running the code snippet, I get the error seen in the title.

I have re-installed the package pydub,and pip3 install ffprobe.

 from pydub.playback import play from pydub import AudioSegment def change_volume(file_name, alteration): song = AudioSegment.from_mp3(file_name) new_song = song + alteration new_title = ("_%s") % (file_name) new_song.export(new_title, format='mp3') change_volume("test_sample.mp3", 3) 

The output of the code should be a new mp3 file in the directory with slightly risen volume levels (test.mp3 --> _test.mp3), instead I get the error:

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'ffprobe': 'ffprobe' 

8 Answers

First make sure you have ffprobe installed, which is part of FFmpeg, so actually you need to install ffmpeg. You can do that by following the instructions of one of those two sites.

After that you need to add the libary to your system path for python to be able to find and to use it. That can be done by either actually adding the installation path of FFmpeg to your OS path (How to do that depends on your operating system), or by adding it to the temporary path variable that is used inside of python.

import sys sys.path.append('/path/to/ffmpeg') 

For the second option you have to make sure to append the path to FFmpeg before importing anything else. This is the better option if you have no option to change the configuration of the root system, but can become very inconsistent when used by different python scripts.

Finally make sure to have ffprobe installed (e.g. with pip install ffprobe inside a terminal, see ) so that import ffprobe should work inside the python environment.

I tried the following method, and it worked:

$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install ffmpeg 

(I'm on a Mac, using Anaconda3.)

Everyone keeps saying add ffmpeg or ffprobe to your path, but to be clear this means add the executable file to your path (not the directory, not the .py file, or anything else). For some reason, even after pip installing/updating and installing/updating via homebrew both ffmpeg and ffprobe, there were no executable files on my system for either. This seems odd; I have no idea why this might be, but here's how I got it to work:

1. Go to and download the zips of both ffmpeg and ffprobe for your system.
2. Unzip the files to get the executable files.
3. Move the executable files to the correct path, which for me was "usr/anaconda3/bin" (this directory primarily has executable files). As others have said, you can check your path using import os; print(os.environ['PATH']).
4. Manually open each of those two executable files from Finder, just so you can give permission to open the file from an unknown developer (i.e. from the ffbinaries site).

That's what finally did it for me, anyway. Hope that helps someone else with the same problem.

I was install ffmpeg through this comamnd inside my docker container "pip3 install ffmpeg-python" and I got this error too, then I install it through apt-get -> apt-get install ffmpeg and everything is worked fine

On my Mac, ffmpeg was installed at /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin. I added this function which adds my actual path to ffmpeg to the System PATH while the python app is running. This allowed pydub to find it.

def add_usr_local_bin(): ffmpeg_path = "/usr/local/bin" os.environ["PATH"] += os.pathsep + ffmpeg_path 

You can try following command

apt-get install -y ffpmeg 

I'm on OS X and following helped me.

I had to download both ffmpeg and ffprobe from

Then:

sudo cp Downloads/ffmpeg /usr/local/bin/ sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg ffmpeg sudo cp Downloads/ffprobe /usr/local/bin/ sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/ffprobe ffprobe 

If usr/local/bin doesn't exists, create it with sudo mkdir usr/local/bin.

You'll maybe need to go to System Preferences > Security and Privacy to allow running ffmpeg and ffprobe.

I am usign Apple Silicon M2 and this simple command worked for me.

brew install ffmpeg