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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: Is WAV a legacy audio format

This topic is old and might contain outdated or incorrect information.

I was just looking at the recording options in vdj and I noticed that WAV is termed a legacy audio format.

About 95% of my audio is WAV files, and I am wondering if there is a newer alternative to WAV, and if so what are its benefits.


Thanks
 
Posted Mon 14 Dec 15 @ 12:16 am
Flac is newer open source and the files are smaller
 
WAV file format is indeed a legacy format.
However it's still one popular format for uncompressed audio and it's used mainly in DAW's for recording, and rendering mixes or to export samples.

The main limitations of WAV file format are:
A) It has a size limit! A WAV file can't be bigger than 4GB (or even 2GB for some applications) This means that for CD-Audio quality a recording can't exceed 6 hours and 36 minutes.
B) It hasn't a standard tagging system, therefore there's not any standard way to include metadata on the file itself.

Additionally to that, WAV is an uncompressed data file format. Despite the fact that nowdays GB's are cheap, there are a lot more alternative file formats that offer LOSELESS compression and therefore their size is smaller that WAV making them more attractive.
Such a file format is FLAC (Free Loseless Audio Codec) which offers a compression algorithm that can make a file be 50% -60% smaller of a WAV file without loosing any data (thus no quality loss), a tagging system to store metadata and practically no size limit.
Finally FLAC is open-source in contrast to WAV which is governed by IBM and Microsoft (not that you should care about that) :P
 
Thanks for such a detailed reply.
I can't get my head around the file sizes being so much smaller but still keeping audio quality. I can however appreciate some of the tagging issues with wav files.

Can you point me in the direction of any additional reading regarding flac and wav comparisons.
 
More reading about FLAC on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

As said, it is lossless compression, so the output is 100% identical to the original wav.
Wav of Aiff still make sense while editing, but for storage of songs that you don't plan to edit anymore flac indeed makes more sense nowadays. (And since it's lossless, you can always decide to convert it back to wav or some new format if it comes up when required)
 
Thanks for the link.
Having read that, and lots of other stuff regarding WAV to FLAC audio comparisons. Most agreeing that there is no audible difference between either file type. Is the main advantage of FLAC, other than size, its tagging capabilities.

What advantages will I get in vdj if my files are FLAC rather than WAV.

Thanks again.
 
Except for the disk space you gain and the ability to store a bit more information in the tag of the file, it doesn't really matter for vdj which one you use.
If you use a traditional hard disk the file will probably be finished loading a bit faster because of the smaller file size.
 
I'm a massive stickler on quality and all of my audio which I have ripped from CD is in FLAC format. There's a mess of videos and testing where studio staff took .wav files, converted them to .flac, then converted them back to .wav and ran spectrum analyzers on the files and they are still identical.

I personally have never gotten .flac files to be that much of a percentage smaller. I average about 10-15%.
 


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