WAV (or WAVE ), short for WAVE form audio format, is a Microsoft and International Business Machines audio file format standard for storing audio on personal computer. It is a variant of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in chunks , and thus also close to the Interchange File Format and the AIFF format used on Apple Macintosh computers. It takes into account some peculiarities of the Intel Central processing unit 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 Microsoft Windows systems for raw audio.

Though a WAV file can hold audio audio data compression with any codec, by far the most common format is pulse-code modulation 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.

WAV files can be used as an intermediary storage type for ripping songs from cassette tapes. People using Windows s Sound Recorder can redirect the output from their old Walkman-type cassette players s ear phone jacks to the PC audio input jacks via an audio cable. Although Sound Recorder can only record for 60 seconds, there are easy ways to lengthen the file for long songs or even the entire tape (record something, choose decrease speed from the effects menu, repeat until file is sufficiently long, and then record over it from the beginning). The WAV file is then converted via freeware packages to other, more compact file format.

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 data compression formats such as MP3, Vorbis and Advanced Audio Coding 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 Windows Media Audio Lossless.

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 more than 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 created for use in Sound Forge. This format can be converted using the LGPL [http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/ libsndfile] library.

Contrary to the popular misconception, audio CDs do not use WAV as their storage format. The commonality is that both audio CDs and WAV files have the audio data encoded in PCM, but WAV is a data file format for computer use; if you rip an audio CD to WAV files and burn them onto a CD-R as a data disc (ISO 9660) and insert it into a player that can handle only audio CDs, the CD will not play.

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