Get .wav file length or duration

I’m looking for a way to find out the duration of a audio file (.wav) in python. So far i had a look at python wave library, mutagen, pymedia, pymad i was not able to get the duration of the wav file. Pymad gave me the duration but its not consistent.

Answer

The duration is equal to the number of frames divided by the framerate (frames per second):

import wave
import contextlib
fname = '/tmp/test.wav'
with contextlib.closing(wave.open(fname,'r')) as f:
    frames = f.getnframes()
    rate = f.getframerate()
    duration = frames / float(rate)
    print(duration)

---

Regarding @edwards’ comment, here is some code to produce a 2-channel wave file:

import math
import wave
import struct
FILENAME = "/tmp/test.wav"
freq = 440.0
data_size = 40000
frate = 1000.0
amp = 64000.0
nchannels = 2
sampwidth = 2
framerate = int(frate)
nframes = data_size
comptype = "NONE"
compname = "not compressed"
data = [(math.sin(2 * math.pi * freq * (x / frate)),
        math.cos(2 * math.pi * freq * (x / frate))) for x in range(data_size)]
try:
    wav_file = wave.open(FILENAME, 'w')
    wav_file.setparams(
        (nchannels, sampwidth, framerate, nframes, comptype, compname))
    for values in data:
        for v in values:
            wav_file.writeframes(struct.pack('h', int(v * amp / 2)))
finally:
    wav_file.close()

If you play the resultant file in an audio player, you’ll find that is 40 seconds in duration. If you run the code above it also computes the duration to be 40 seconds. So I believe the number of frames is not influenced by the number of channels and the formula above is correct.