What is a channel exactly in [a,fs] = audioread(file)?

Basically the title.

I inserted a 3 min audio file and it gave fs=48000 and a 11084678x2 matrix.

Apparently the 2 columns represents the channels in the audio? What exactly does that mean?

And also what exactly are the values in the 2x2 matrix and why exactly are they stored as a "double"? Would love to hear any explanation.

[Voss]

Explanation of what an audio channel is:

https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com/resources/faqs/what-is-an-audio-channel

What 2x2 matrix are you referring to?

[dpb]

Followup on the original https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1711795-what-does-a-fs-audioread-filename-do?s_tid=answers_rc1-1_p1_MLT, don't duplicate same Q?

audioread would never return a 2x2 matrix unless there were only two samples for two channels in the input file. Per the doc on output arumuents, the reason the returned audio data is or will be a double is because the optional dataType input parameter was not specified.

• If you do not specify dataType, or dataType is 'double', then y is of type double, and matrix elements are normalized values between −1.0 and 1.0.
• If dataType is 'native', then y can be one of several MATLAB data types, depending on the file format and the BitsPerSample value of the input file.

All of this is in the documentation.

[Axel Blaze]

Not 2x2 my bad. I meant a ix2 matrix where i is a very large number.

[Rik]

@dpb, given that this is a duplicate, shouldn't it be closed as such?