21.5. sndhdr — Determine type of sound file

The sndhdr provides utility functions which attempt to determine the type of sound data which is in a file. When these functions are able to determine what type of sound data is stored in a file, they return a tuple (type, sampling_rate, channels, frames, bits_per_sample). The value for type indicates the data type and will be one of the strings 'aifc', 'aiff', 'au', 'hcom', 'sndr', 'sndt', 'voc', 'wav', '8svx', 'sb', 'ub', or 'ul'. The sampling_rate will be either the actual value or 0 if unknown or difficult to decode. Similarly, channels will be either the number of channels or 0 if it cannot be determined or if the value is difficult to decode. The value for frames will be either the number of frames or -1. The last item in the tuple, bits_per_sample, will either be the sample size in bits or 'A' for A-LAW or 'U' for u-LAW.

sndhdr.what(filename)

Determines the type of sound data stored in the file filename using whathdr(). If it succeeds, returns a tuple as described above, otherwise None is returned.

sndhdr.whathdr(filename)

Determines the type of sound data stored in a file based on the file header. The name of the file is given by filename. This function returns a tuple as described above on success, or None.