I am trying to perform zonal statistics on a single band from a multi-band raster in .pix format.

I have things working great with a tiff file. I am able to access the bands using this code:

    desc = arcpy.Describe(inRaster)

    for band in desc.children:
        bandName = band.name
        currentBand = inRaster + "\\" + bandName

And then just using bandName as the input raster.

However, this code does not work with my .pix file ("Input value raster: testraster.pix\b does not exist.")

I think I can use the CopyRaster tool to convert the file to tiff format, but this is slow and seems like it should be unnecessary.

Does anyone know if there is an easier/more efficient way?

Thanks for any suggestions.