The WAVE (Waveform Audio) is a proprietary file format developed by Microsoft for use in Windows 3.1. It is actually a variant of the RIFF bitstream format and is a ``wrapper'' format capable of containing audio data of various types, including compressed audio data. The default (and most common) type of data contained in a WAVE file is PCM data, which can be accommodated in a variety of channels at various sampling rates and resolutions.
WAVE is the format most frequently used in Windows operating systems for uncompressed audio. Many compact disc ``ripping'' applications store the resulting raw data in WAVE format, so it is often used as an intermediate format when preparing compressed audio for streaming.