This sndhdr module, shown in Example 9-2, can be used to identify different audio file formats and extract basic information about a file’s contents.

If successful, the what function returns a 5-tuple, containing the filetype, the sampling rate, the number of channels, the number of frames in the file (–1 means unknown), and the number of bits per sample.

File: sndhdr-example-1.py

import sndhdr

result = sndhdr.what("samples/sample.wav")

if result:
    print "file format:", result
else:
    print "cannot identify file"

file format: ('wav', 44100, 1, -1, 16)