[PD] acquiring information about wav files

[Roman Haefeli]

Hi all

I am looking for a way to get information about WAV files in Pd,
specifically the number of channels and the number of frames. I know
[wavinfo], but it does not seem to work on windows ("error: could not
read WAV-header" with any file I could find) and on linux it seems to
read only a subset of WAV formats. It does not read from widely used
broadcast format WAV files. The target platform is windows AND linux
anyway in this case, so I need a portable solution.

The most troubling fact is, that some Pd-vanilla classes ([soundfiler],
[readsf~]) actually do retrieve the information I need, they read both,
the number of frames and the number of channels correctly, with all pcm
encoded wav files I tried, but - what a pity - they don't expose this
information to the patch level. 

Hopefully I am overseeing the obvious here. Hints are very welcome.

Roman