How can I tell if a recording is multi-channel without third party tools?

Question

A customer has an audio that is confidential and can't send it to me. He also doesn't want to install any tools.

Is there any way to tell whether the recording is one channel or two channel?

Normally, I would just get the audio and SoXI it. Alternatively, I would tell him to install Audacity or an equivalent sound editor and open it up. I also thought that if you right clicked and looked at the size, bit rate, and length, you could get the number of channels. But, the bit rate already factors in the number of channels.

Answer 1

The number of channels for an audio file are not stored against the meta data like the bitrate, etc. so I'm not sure how he can figure it out without installing a program that can go through and read the content. Is there a particular reason they don't want to download a small program?

Better yet why don't you visit your customer, and open it up for him while you are on-site, he gets what he wants, you get to bill for what you want, everyone is happy ;)