The wave
module returns the frames as a string of bytes, which can be converted to numbers with the struct
module. For instance:
def oneChannel(fname, chanIdx):
""" list with specified channel's data from multichannel wave with 16-bit data """
f = wave.open(fname, 'rb')
chans = f.getnchannels()
samps = f.getnframes()
sampwidth = f.getsampwidth()
assert sampwidth == 2
s = f.readframes(samps) #read the all the samples from the file into a byte string
f.close()
unpstr = '<{0}h'.format(samps*chans) #little-endian 16-bit samples
x = list(struct.unpack(unpstr, s)) #convert the byte string into a list of ints
return x[chanIdx::chans] #return the desired channel
If your WAV file has some other sample size, you can use the (uglier) function in another answer I wrote here.
I've never used scipy
's wavfile
function so I can't compare speed, but the wave
and struct
approach I use here has always worked for me.