MP3 decoder module?

[Paul Rubin]

Anyone know of a reasonable mp3 decoder library I can call from
Python?  Some Googling didn't find anything too promising.  It found
Pymedia (which plays mp3's through a sound system) and any number of
utilities that parse ID3 tags and other metadata.  But I want to
actually decode the mp3 frames and crunch on the audio samples.
Basically I want to write a program that takes an mp3 audio file and
finds the silent frames, with the idea of chopping the file into
segments at those points automatically, or compressing the silences
out of spoken audio to make it play faster without chipmunking up the
pitch, etc.  Of course if you know of something that does this stuff
already, that can help too.

I think I don't need mp3 encoding, just decoding.  I want to decode
and recognize certain frames and chop them out, but the non-chopped
frames will be copied verbatim to avoid quality loss from re-encoding.

Thanks.