Broadcast Wave Format

The Broadcast Wave Format ( BWF abbreviation ) is a subset of the WAV sound file format. It was specified in terms of the interests of broadcasting in 1997 by the European Broadcasting Union ( EBU) and expanded in 2001 with regard to the storage of metadata.

BWF is in a professional environment today, the data format most used for storing audio. In addition to pure audio recorders, it is also used for the audio in digital image recorders in television production. The format is designed for both linear PCM ( RIFF id 0x0001 ), as well as compressed MPEG 1 Layer II audio signals ( RIFF id 0x0050 ) specified. The file extension is ". Wav" and can thus be read by omitting the specific metadata on any PC. With newer media players, there can be problems if the more popular format can play MPEG I Layer III (MP3) only more or incorrectly in the ending. " Wav" PCM only expect. The default format is PCM at a sampling rate of 16 bits and a sampling rate of 48 kHz. Other values ​​can be used when the exchange organizations agree.

In 2005, the RF64 format for file-based multi-channel production and post production was specified as the BWF -compatible multichannel audio data format to complement the EBU. The extended address space so that files are more than four GByte.