Waveform Audio Format

WAV (or WAVE), short for Waveform audio file format, is a digital audio format with or without data compression developed by Microsoft and IBM that is used to store digital audio streams on the PC, mono and stereo at various resolutions and sample rates. File extensions of this type are.wav and.wave.

Description

The WAV file is a variant of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF), a method for storing in "packages" defined by IBM and Microsoft. RIFF acts as a "container" for various audio encoding formats and is relatively similar to the IFF and AIFF formats, the latter used by the Apple Macintosh computer. The format takes into account some peculiarities of the Intel CPU, and is the main format used by Microsoft Windows.

Although the WAV format is compatible with almost any audio codec, it is used with the Linear Pulse Coded Modulation (LPCM) format, which is not it has loss of quality and is suitable for professional use. To obtain a quality similar to that of the audio CD, the sound must be sampled at a frequency of 44100 Hz and 16 bits for each audio channel. Since LPCM is not compressed and retains all the samples in an audio track, professional users or audio experts can use the WAV format with LPCM audio for the highest audio quality. WAV files can also be relatively easily edited and manipulated using software.

The WAV format also supports compressed audio, using Microsoft's Audio Compression Manager codec (Codec ACM), achieving good audio quality to file size ratios, similar to those of files from MP3 or Ogg Vorbis types. Since these are smaller, the transfer of such files over the Internet is much faster. The user interface (UI) for the Audio Compression Manager can be accessed through various programs that use it, including Sound Recorder in some versions of Windows.

Starting with Windows 2000, a WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE header was defined that specifies multiple audio channel data along with speaker positions, disambiguates regarding sample types and sizes of containers in the standard WAV format and supports the definition of custom extensions for the snippet format.

Popularity

Uncompressed WAV files are large, so sharing WAV files over the Internet is rare. However, it is a commonly used file type, suitable for preserving high-quality first-generation audio files, for use on a system where disk space is not a constraint, or in applications such as audio editing, where the times involved in compressing and decompressing the data are a concern.

The use of the WAV format has more to do with its familiarity and simple structure. Because of this, it continues to enjoy widespread use with a variety of software applications, often serving as a "lowest common denominator" when it comes to exchanging sound files between different programs.

Limitations

The WAV format is limited to files smaller than 4 294 967 295 bytes (4 Gibibytes), because in the file header, regardless of the operating system being used, its length is indicated as a 32-bit unsigned integer. Although this is equivalent to approximately 6.8 hours of CD-quality audio (with 44.1 kHz sample rate, 16-bit stereo), it is sometimes necessary to exceed this limit, especially when higher sample rates are required, bit resolutions or channel count. The RF64 format specified by the European Broadcasting Union has also been created to solve this problem.

Use for non-audio data

Since the sample rate of a WAV file can range from 1 Hz to 4.3 GHz, and the number of audio channels can be as high as 65535,.wav files have also been used for non-audio data. Audio. The LTspice program, for example, can store multiple circuit traces (waveforms) on separate channels, at any appropriate sample rate, with the full scale range representing ±1 V or A instead of sound pressure.