WAV Audio File Format Description:

WAV (or WAVE), short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is a variant of the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in “chunks”, and thus also close to the IFF and the AIFF format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw and typically uncompressed audio. The default bitstream encoding is the Microsoft Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) format.
Both WAVs and AIFFs are compatible with Windows and Macintosh operating systems. The format takes into account some differences of the Intel CPU such as little-endian byte order. The RIFF format acts as a “wrapper” for various audio compression codecs.
Though a WAV file can hold compressed audio, the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the pulse-code modulation (PCM) format. PCM audio is the standard audio file format for CDs, containing two channels of 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample. 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. The WAV format supports compressed audio using Audio Compression Manager. Any ACM codec can be used to compress a WAV file. The UI for Audio Compression Manager is accessible by default through Sound Recorder.
Beginning with Windows 2000, a WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE header was defined which specifies multiple audio channel data (surround sound) 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.
Audio CDs do not use WAV as their sound format, using instead Red Book audio. The commonality is that both audio CDs and WAV files have the audio data encoded in PCM. WAV is a data file format for a computer to use that can't be understood by CD players directly. To record WAV files to an Audio CD the file headers must be stripped and the remaining PCM data written directly to the disc as individual tracks with zero padding added to match the CD's sector size.

Audio Transcoder supports the following conversions with WAV format files:

• WAV to AAC
• WAV to APE
• WAV to FLAC
• WAV to M4A
• WAV to M4B
• WAV to MP2

• WAV to MP3

• WAV to MP4
• WAV to TTA
• WAV to MPC
• WAV to OGG
• WAV to SPX
• WAV to WAV
• WAV to WMA
• AAC to WAV
• AC3 to WAV
• AIF to WAV
• APE to WAV
• FLAC to WAV
• M4A to WAV
• MP+ to WAV
• MP1 to WAV
• MP2 to WAV
• MP3 to WAV
• MP4 to WAV
• MPC to WAV
• MPP to WAV
• OFR to WAV
• OFS to WAV
• OGG to WAV
• SPX to WAV
• TTA to WAV
• WAV to WAV
• WMA to WAV
• WV to WAV

Note that Audio Transcoder is not only a great Audio Converter. It is all-in-one solution to convert any audio files - WAV, WMA, MP3, TTA, MP4, FLAC and many others, rip Audio CD's, edit metadata (audio tags) .