c# - How to read the data in a wav file to an array

Question

I need to get all the samples of a wav file into an array (or two if you need to do that to keep the stereo) so that I can apply some modifications to them. I was wondering if this is easily done (preferably without external libraries). I have no experience with reading in sound files, so I don't know much about the subject.

Answer 1

This code should do the trick. It converts a wave file to a normalized double array (-1 to 1), but it should be trivial to make it an int/short array instead (remove the /32768.0 bit and add 32768 instead). The right[] array will be set to null if the loaded wav file is found to be mono.

I can't claim it's completely bullet proof (potential off-by-one errors), but after creating a 65536 sample array, and creating a wave from -1 to 1, none of the samples appear to go 'through' the ceiling or floor.

// convert two bytes to one double in the range -1 to 1
static double bytesToDouble(byte firstByte, byte secondByte) {
    // convert two bytes to one short (little endian)
    short s = (secondByte << 8) | firstByte;
    // convert to range from -1 to (just below) 1
    return s / 32768.0;
}

// Returns left and right double arrays. 'right' will be null if sound is mono.
public void openWav(string filename, out double[] left, out double[] right)
{
    byte[] wav = File.ReadAllBytes(filename);

    // Determine if mono or stereo
    int channels = wav[22];     // Forget byte 23 as 99.999% of WAVs are 1 or 2 channels

    // Get past all the other sub chunks to get to the data subchunk:
    int pos = 12;   // First Subchunk ID from 12 to 16

    // Keep iterating until we find the data chunk (i.e. 64 61 74 61 ...... (i.e. 100 97 116 97 in decimal))
    while(!(wav[pos]==100 && wav[pos+1]==97 && wav[pos+2]==116 && wav[pos+3]==97)) {
        pos += 4;
        int chunkSize = wav[pos] + wav[pos + 1] * 256 + wav[pos + 2] * 65536 + wav[pos + 3] * 16777216;
        pos += 4 + chunkSize;
    }
    pos += 8;

    // Pos is now positioned to start of actual sound data.
    int samples = (wav.Length - pos)/2;     // 2 bytes per sample (16 bit sound mono)
    if (channels == 2) samples /= 2;        // 4 bytes per sample (16 bit stereo)

    // Allocate memory (right will be null if only mono sound)
    left = new double[samples];
    if (channels == 2) right = new double[samples];
    else right = null;

    // Write to double array/s:
    int i=0;
    while (pos < length) {
        left[i] = bytesToDouble(wav[pos], wav[pos + 1]);
        pos += 2;
        if (channels == 2) {
            right[i] = bytesToDouble(wav[pos], wav[pos + 1]);
            pos += 2;
        }
        i++;
    }
}