WAV

Where it came from

WAV arrived in 1991 as part of RIFF, the IBM/Microsoft resource-interchange framework for Windows 3.1 multimedia. Thirty-plus years later it remains the lingua franca of audio editing precisely because it does almost nothing.

How it works

A WAV is a RIFF container wrapping a `fmt ` chunk (sample rate, bit depth, channel count) and a `data` chunk of raw PCM samples — amplitude measurements taken tens of thousands of times per second.

CD quality is 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo ≈ 10 MB per minute. No compression means no artifacts, no decode latency, and trivial seeking — hence its role as the 'working' format in studios and pipelines.

UWC treats WAV as the hub of its audio pipeline: decoded PCM goes in, any target format comes out.