MATLAB: How can i pair files with almost the same filename in order to create stereo wav files from mono wav files (ideally as a batch)

Question

I have a somewhat complicated task I would like to perform that is well beyond my novice level of experience with Matlab. I am using Matlab R2014a.

I use a recording system that creates 2 mono wav files from an acoustic manikin. This is usually done in a batch process across several conditions. The mono wav files are saved in a single directory and are named by the condition. What differentiates the files is the last character in the filename, before the extension – 0 designates the file as left ear, 1 designates right ear.

For example FirstCondition_0.wav FirstCondition_1.wav SecondCondition_0.wav SecondCondition_1.wav ClassicalMusic_0.wav ClassicalMusic_1.wav

What I'd like to do is create a script that can create stereo wav files from the pairs of recordings, as a batch process.

I can do it manually, but after some experiments there are a lot of files.

What I envision is using uigetdir to set the input directory and the output directory, then somehow use a loop to combine the pairs with filename_0.wav becoming (:,1) and filename_1.wav becoming (:,2) for each matched pair.

Does anyone have any suggestions, examples, or ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

since you have already the script to combine you can get the list of items by using something like this

list = dir('*.txt');
for i=1:length(list)
    Name{i,1} = list(i).name;
end
uScore = cellfun(@(x) strfind(x,'_'),Name);
uScore = num2cell(uScore);
Fname = cellfun(@(x,y) x(1:y-1),Name,uScore,'UniformOutput',false)
unique(Fname)

This will get you the specific names where you can concatenate the '_0.wav' and the _1.wav to it before processing.

so get the list of files, do a for loop for the number of unique filename (before _) and concatenate the _#.wav for your script.