Edit: Ah ha! note that I scoured the documentation a little harder and found a line that seems to answer my question. See below for the answer.

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Alright processing community, I need your help.

I was in the middle of writing up a tutorial aimed at beginner processing-ites looking to render non-realtime visualisations with the hopes of helping someone out and solidifying my knowledge of the task. But then I became confused...

Here's the setup:

I have an aif file that runs for 1 minute and 9 seconds. The sample rate is 44100 kHz. These are facts and I'm 100% confident of this information. Technically (if you were to scan the file manually) this would corispond to 3042900 samples for each channel which comes to 3042900 * 2 total samples for the left and right channels combined.

However when I load a file into an Ess.AudioChannel object using Ess.MIX the length of the sample array is 3042900 . So what exactly is going on here? Are the two individual samples averaged into one? Or am I confusing the way a stereo aif is stored with the way Ess actually uses it.

confused and dangling by a thread,
ness

Amendment:
 Maybe I have this sampling rate concept backwards... does sample rate actually take into account the fact the signial is in stereo? In that case the sampling rate for each channel would be 22.05kHz which would mean the highest frequency it can measure (due to the Nyquist rate) is 11.025 kHz?

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Mystery solved(most likely):
So i while reading the documentation for the Ess.AudioFile object i noted this line: "When loading a stereo sound a left/right channel may be specified, or both channels may be mixed to one mono channel. "

It seems my suspicions were correct that the left and right channels are being  mixed down into one mono signal which halves the total samples for a stereo file.