WAVE

Description #

Waveform Audio File Format, also known as WAVE (file extension: .wav), is the most common audio format passive acoustic sensors collect. All commonly used software and analysis packages work well for importing and exporting WAVE files since it is the most common audio format used for acoustic ecology. An advantage of WAVE is that there is typically no compression to the file, so we can analyse these files using different types of software without any problems. However, the disadvantage of uncompressed files is that they are usually very large in size, making it more difficult to store and share them.

WAVE files may be compressed to a different audio format to reduce their file size. Before compressing your files or working with compressed audio formats, it is important to know that some compression formats, such as MP3, use a method of compression that can result in a loss of quality (lossy compression). You can avoid this shortcoming by using lossless compression formats such as FLAC, where there is no reduction in quality.