WAV

From Free net encyclopedia

WAV (or WAVE), short for WAVE form audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is a variant of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks", and thus also close to the IFF and the AIFF format used on Macintosh computers. It takes into account some differences of the Intel CPU such as little-endian byte order. The RIFF format acts as a "wrapper" for various audio compression codecs. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw audio.

Though a WAV file can hold audio compressed with any codec, by far the most common format is pulse-code modulation (PCM) audio data. Since PCM uses an uncompressed, lossless storage method, which keeps all the samples of an audio track, professional users or audio experts may use the WAV format for maximum audio quality. WAV audio can also be edited and manipulated with relative ease using software.

1 Popularity
2 Limitations
3 Audio CDs
4 External links

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Popularity

As file sharing over the Internet has become popular, the WAV format has declined in popularity, primarily because uncompressed WAV files are quite large in size. More frequently, compressed but lossy formats such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC are used to store and transfer audio, since their smaller file sizes allow for faster transfers over the Internet, and large collections of files consume only a conservative amount of disk space. There are also more efficient lossless codecs available, such as Monkey's Audio, TTA, WavPack, FLAC, Shorten, Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless.

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Limitations

The WAV format is limited to files that are less than 2 GiB in size, due to the way its 32-bit file size header is read by most programs. Although this is equivalent to about 3.3 hours of CD-quality audio (44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo), it is sometimes necessary to go over this limit. The W64 format was therefore created for use in Sound Forge. Its 64-bit header allows for much longer recording times. This format can be converted using the libsndfile library.

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Audio CDs

Audio CDs do not use WAV as their sound format. The commonality is that both audio CDs and WAV files have the audio data encoded in PCM. WAV is a data file format for computer use. If one were to transfer an audio CD bit stream to WAV files and record them onto a CD-R as a data disc (in ISO format), the CD could not be played in a player that was only designed to play audio CDs.

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