WAV is Microsoft's uncompressed audio container, built on the RIFF chunk format, and the de facto interchange file for masters, stems, and editing. Inside it is almost always linear PCM, bit-for-bit what the ADC captured, which is why WAV is lossless and large. The classic format has a 4 GB ceiling because its size fields are 32-bit; the RF64/BWF extensions lift that for long multichannel recordings and add broadcast metadata like timecode. WAV is the safe lingua franca between tools — every DAW, encoder, and analyzer reads it — but you compress to AAC, Opus, or FLAC before anything ships.
