
Wave
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or more commonly known as WAV) is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is an application of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks", and thus is also close to the AIFF format used on Macintosh computers. Both WAVs and AIFFs are compatible with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. Though a WAV file can hold compressed audio, the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the linear pulse code modulation (LPCM) format. The standard audio file format for CDs, for example, is LPCM-encoded, containing two channels of 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample.
Pro Audio Converter is capable of creating WAV files with lossless Linear PCM data as well as the following compressed data formats:
Here are some paramaters that can be configured when creating WAV files with Linear PCM audio data:
Sample Rate
Sample rate is the number of samples of audio carried per second, measured in Hz or kHz (1000 Hz). 44.1 kHz is the sampling rate of audio CDs and 48.0 kHz is commonly used for professional video. Higher sample rates result in higher quality audio with larger file sizes. Setting this to Auto will create an output file with the same sample rate as the input file. If the output file does not support the sample rate of the input file, Pro Audio Converter will use the greatest sample rate that is supported.
Bit Depth
Bit Depth defines the numer of bits (1's and 0's) used to represent each sample.
By increasing the bit depth, quantization noise is reduced improving the signal to noise ratio. For each 1-bit increment in bit depth, the S/N will increase by 6dB. 24-bit digital audio has a theoretical maximum S/N of 144 dB, compared to 96 dB for 16-bit. Audio CDs use a bit depth of 16 bits. 24-bit is common in professional audio and video environments.
Endianness
Endianness referes to the byte-order of each sample.
Big Endian stores the most significant byte first, and Little Endian stores the least significant byte first. By definition WAV files are always Little Endian.
Channels
This defines the number of audio channels contained in the output file. Setting this to Auto will attempt to create an output file with the same number of channels as the input file, if it is possible. You can also manually set it to output Stereo (2 channels) or Mono (1 channel).
Quality
The Good setting is optimized for the highest-speed encoding, for higher-quality choose Better or Best (optimal for 24-bit source). The tradeoff is between encoding speed and audio quality.