Recording 24-bit audio with pyaudio

Question

I need to record 24-bit audio (because it's the archival standard for audio digitization). However, the wave library seems to only go up to 16-bit.

It looks like pyaudio can work with 24-bit audio but every example I've found shows pyaudio using the wave library, meaning it has to save 16-bit.

Is it possible to record and playback 24-bit audio with pyaudio?

Answer 1

Yes it is possible. You just have to take the record example of PyAudio and replace pyaudio.paInt16 by pyaudio.paInt24.

import pyaudio
import wave

CHUNK = 1024
FORMAT = pyaudio.paInt24
CHANNELS = 2
RATE = 44100
RECORD_SECONDS = 5
WAVE_OUTPUT_FILENAME = "output.wav"

p = pyaudio.PyAudio()

stream = p.open(format=FORMAT,
                channels=CHANNELS,
                rate=RATE,
                input=True,
                frames_per_buffer=CHUNK)

print("* recording")

frames = []

for i in range(0, int(RATE / CHUNK * RECORD_SECONDS)):
    data = stream.read(CHUNK)
    frames.append(data)

print("* done recording")

stream.stop_stream()
stream.close()
p.terminate()

wf = wave.open(WAVE_OUTPUT_FILENAME, 'wb')
wf.setnchannels(CHANNELS)
wf.setsampwidth(p.get_sample_size(FORMAT))
wf.setframerate(RATE)
wf.writeframes(b''.join(frames))
wf.close()

Answer 2

check if the top end 8 bits are 0. If they are not, you have a true 24 bit recording.