Tags consisting of all capital letters are reserved tags. The tag specifies how the data within the chunk should be interpreted, and there are several standard FourCC tags. It has a specific container format (a chunk) that includes a four-character tag ( FourCC) and the size (number of bytes) of the chunk. There are some inconsistencies in the WAV format: for example, 8-bit data is unsigned while 16-bit data is signed, and many chunks duplicate information found in other chunks.Ī RIFF file is a tagged file format.

The user interface (UI) for Audio Compression Manager may be accessed through various programs that use it, including Sound Recorder in some versions of Windows.īeginning with Windows 2000, a WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE header was defined which specifies multiple audio channel data along with speaker positions, eliminates ambiguity regarding sample types and container sizes in the standard WAV format and supports defining custom extensions to the format chunk. Any ACM codec can be used to compress a WAV file. The WAV format supports compressed audio using, on Microsoft Windows, the Audio Compression Manager. WAV files can also be edited and manipulated with relative ease using software. Since LPCM is uncompressed and retains all of the samples of an audio track, professional users or audio experts may use the WAV format with LPCM audio for maximum audio quality. LPCM is also the standard audio coding format for audio CDs, which store two-channel LPCM audio sampled at 44,100 Hz with 16 bits per sample. Though a WAV file can contain compressed audio, the most common WAV audio format is uncompressed audio in the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format. The RIFF format acts as a 'wrapper' for various audio coding formats. The WAV file is an instance of a Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) defined by IBM and Microsoft.

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