Add article for splitting channels in R

[atruskie]

I have my recordings made on a stereo recorder but with the left and the right channels reflecting different experimental set ups

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[atruskie]

e.g.

# Function to split stereo WAV into two mono WAVs using ffmpeg
split_stereo_wav <- function(file_path) {
  # Ensure ffmpeg is installed
  if (system2("ffmpeg", "-version", stdout = TRUE, stderr = TRUE)[1] == "") {
    stop("ffmpeg not found. Please install ffmpeg and ensure it is in your system PATH.")
  }
  
  # Extract file name without extension and directory
  file_name <- tools::file_path_sans_ext(basename(file_path))
  file_dir <- dirname(file_path)
  
  # Construct output file paths
  left_channel_path <- file.path(file_dir, paste0(file_name, "_L.wav"))
  right_channel_path <- file.path(file_dir, paste0(file_name, "_R.wav"))
  
  # Construct ffmpeg command
  ffmpeg_cmd <- sprintf(
    "-i \"%s\" -map_channel 0.0.0 \"%s\" -map_channel 0.0.1 \"%s\"",
    file_path, left_channel_path, right_channel_path
  )
  
  # Run ffmpeg command
  system2("ffmpeg", args = ffmpeg_cmd, stdout = TRUE, stderr = TRUE)
  
  # Return output file paths
  return(list(left_channel = left_channel_path, right_channel = right_channel_path))
}

# Example usage
# split_stereo_wav("path/to/your/stereo.wav")

It would be great if we could find a native R way to do this as well.