I'm trying to write a program to display PCM data. I've been very frustrated trying to find a library with the right level of abstraction, but I've found the python wave library and have been using that. However, I'm not sure how to interpret the data.
The wave.getparams function returns (2 channels, 2 bytes, 44100 Hz, 96333 frames, No compression, No compression). This all seems cheery, but then I tried printing a single frame:'\xc0\xff\xd0\xff' which is 4 bytes. I suppose it's possible that a frame is 2 samples, but the ambiguities do not end there.
96333 frames * 2 samples/frame * (1/44.1k sec/sample) = 4.3688 seconds
However, iTunes reports the time as closer to 2 seconds and calculations based on file size and bitrate are in the ballpark of 2.7 seconds. What's going on here?
Additionally, how am I to know if the bytes are signed or unsigned?
Many thanks!
"Two channels" means stereo, so it makes no sense to sum each channel's duration -- so you're off by a factor of two (2.18 seconds, not 4.37). As for signedness, as explained for example here, and I quote:
8-bit samples are stored as unsigned bytes, ranging from 0 to 255. 16-bit samples are stored as 2's-complement signed integers, ranging from -32768 to 32767.
This is part of the specs of the WAV format (actually of its superset RIFF) and thus not dependent on what library you're using to deal with a WAV file.