What is python aifc.getsampwidth()?

We come across files almost every day in our tech journey. Sometimes, we have to use Python as our programming language to perform various operations on these files. One such operation is obtaining the size of each sample in our AIFF-C files in bytes.

What are AIFF-C files?

File types range from your regular .doc and .xls files to the not-so-common AIFF files. AIFF stands for Audio Interchange File Format, a standard file format used to store audio files for our electronic audio deviceslike phones and laptop computers. An AIFF-C file is a compressed form of an AIFF file. Compressed AIFF files (AIFF-C) take up less space when compared to the conventional AIFF files, and their extension is .aifc. When working with audio files, it is important to note that some parameters describe the audio data that is stored in your AIFF-C files. These parameters are:

• Frame: one sample of the audio data per channel.

• Frame rate: the number of times per unit time the sound data is sampled.

• Number of channels: indicates if the audio is mono, stereo, or quadro.

• The sample size: the size of each sample in bytes.

From these parameters, you can see that a frame is made up of channels that each contain sample bytes of file data.

How to get the sample size of your AIFF-C file

To get the sample size of your aifc file in your Python code, you will need to call on the getsampwidth() function. This function is part of the Python aifc module that provides support for reading and writing AIFF and AIFF-C files. The aifc module contains other functions that you can use to work with your AIFF files in your code.

Call the getsampwidth() function

Calling this function on your file involves the following steps:

• Import the aifc module with the import statement into your working file.
• Next, you’ll also have to import the AIFF-C file into your working file.
• Open the file with the aifc.open() function, and set the mode to read mode.
• Create an object from the opened file.
• Call the getsampwidth() function on the object.
• Close the file with the aifc.close() function to prevent file leak.
• You can either view the result from the python console with the print() function or, pass the result into a variable that can be further used in your code.

The function returns the file byte size as an integer, which can then be further manipulated like any other Python integer type value. The code for this process is shown below:

>>> import aifc
>>> import audio_file

>>> audio_obj = aifc.open('audio_file','r')

>>> byte_size = audio_obj.aifcgetsampwidth()

>>> aifc.close()

>>> print(byte_size)

## the file byte size is printed on the console.

You can also carry out this operation with a context manager. A context manager helps you manage your resourcesfiles, network calls etc. so you don’t have to worry about closing afterward. While performing a reading or a writing operation on a file with the context manager, the context manager closes the file automatically once the code block is exited or in the case of an exception error. The context manager uses the with statement, as using it in our code makes our code more concise.

The code below shows how we can perform the same operation using a context manager:

>>> import aifc
>>> import audio_file

>>> with aifc.open('audio_file', 'r') as audio_obj:
        byte_size = audio_obj.getsampwidth()

>>> print(byte_size)
## the file byte size is printed on the console.