Raw audio format

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Raw audio format" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A raw audio file is any file containing un-containerized and uncompressed audio. The data is stored as raw pulse-code modulation (PCM) values without any metadata header information (such as sampling rate, bit depth, endian, or number of channels).^[1]

Extensions

Raw files can have a wide range of file extensions, common ones being .wav, .raw, .pcm, or .sam.^[1] They can also have no extension.

Playing

As there is no header, compatible audio players require information from the user that would normally be stored in a header, such as the encoding, sample rate, number of bits used per sample, and the number of channels.

References