compressed and uncompressed .wav files

Question

What is the difference between compressed and uncompressed .wav files?

Answer 1

The difference between these two things is basically in the size of object, the compressed one might have low size compared to uncompressed basically the content are the same.

Answer 2

You have to be very careful when using the word "uncompressed" when talking about media.

Basically ALL digital media is compressed in some way. Audio, or video. No matter what it is, it is compressed in some way. Its intrinsic to converting from analog to digital.

The problem isn't really technical, its lingual.

People think that uncompressed means "nothing done to it" when in reality there really isnt any way you can do this. There is always some kind of compression done when you convert the analog signal coming out of the mic and going into a file...Its essential.

What uncompressed means is very high quality. And different "Uncompressed" codecs do things differently.

I know more about video codecs, so i will base my example in those.

Black Magic (A company that makes video Out Cards) has an Uncompressed Codec. Its very good. Makes Beautiful images.. But its not really "uncompressed". Sure its big. But compare it to a DPX of TIFF image sequence...and it aint that big, and is quite compressed. Its only 10 bit, but something like an OpenEXR image sequence is like 32 bit...and coming from film, that is still technically compressed. It has to be.

Its just the nature of the beast.

Answer 3

There's a great explanation here. The basic difference is that an uncompressed wave file has just the raw bits in it as they "appear". There is nothing done to compress or shrink them. A compressed wave file uses some sort of codec to shrink down the data before putting it in the file.

Answer 4

The WAV format is a container format for audio files in Windows.

The WAV file consists of a header and the contents. The header contains information about the size, duration, sampling frequency, resolution, and other information about the audio contained in the WAV file. Generally, after the header is the actual audio data.

Since WAV is a container format, the data it contains can be stored in various formats. One of which is uncompressed PCM, but it can also store ADPCM, MP3 and other formats, and can be read and written if an audio codec for the format is available.

The difference between compressed and uncompressed WAV files is that the data contained within the WAV file is either uncompressed raw audio samples, or it is compressed using an audio codec, in which case, it must be decompressed before it can be played back.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia: Audio compression (data)
• Wikipedia: WAV
• Wikipedia: Codec