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WAV (or WAVE), short for WAVEform 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 peculiarities 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 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.
As file sharing over the Internet has become popular, the WAV format has declined in popularity, primarily because uncompressed WAV files
are quite large. More frequently, compressed but lossy
formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis 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.
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