Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) is an extension of the popular Microsoft

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

audio format and is the recording format of most file-based

non-linear In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other ...

digital recorders used for

motion picture A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...

, radio and

television production A television show – or simply TV show – is any content produced for viewing on a television set which can be broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, or cable, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are typically placed betw ...

. It was first specified by the

European Broadcasting Union The European Broadcasting Union (EBU; french: Union européenne de radio-télévision, links=no, UER) is an alliance of Public broadcasting, public service media organisations whose countries are within the European Broadcasting Area or who ar ...

in 1997, and updated in 2001 and 2003. It has been accepted as the

ITU The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Unio ...

recommendation ITU-R BS.1352-3, Annex 1. The purpose of this file format is the addition of

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

to facilitate the seamless exchange of sound data between different computer platforms and applications. It specifies the format of metadata, allowing audio processing elements to identify themselves, document their activities, and supports

timecode A timecode (alternatively, time code) is a sequence of numeric codes generated at regular intervals by a timing synchronization system. Timecode is used in video production, show control and other applications which require temporal coordinatio ...

to enable synchronization with other recordings. This metadata is stored as extension chunks in a standard digital audio WAV file. BWF is the recommended format for digitizing sound files by the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives. Files conforming to the Broadcast Wave specification have names ending with the

filename extension A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (e.g., .txt, .docx, .md). The extension indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically d ...

.WAV.

Details

In addition to the common WAVE chunks, the following extension chunks can appear in a Broadcast Wave file:EBU BWF User Guide
/ref> * Original Bext chunk (Broadcast Extension - 'bext') *

iXML {{lowercase iXML is an open standard for the inclusion of location sound metadata in Broadcast Wave audio files, video files and also IP video and audio streams. This includes things like Scene, Take and Notes information. It is the result of ext ...

chunk ('iXML') * Quality chunk ('qlty') * MPEG audio extension chunk ('mext') * Peak Envelope chunk ('levl') * link chunk ('link') * axml chunk ('axml') Since the only difference between a BWF and a "normal" WAV is the extended information in the file header (Bext-Chunk, Coding-History, etc...), a BWF does not require a special player for playback. Unfortunately, this compatibility also preserves the filesize limitation that WAV files have (4 GB of audio data per data chunk). In order to be able to store audio which would exceed this limit, 2 different chunks exist allowing the audio material to be spread across several files: ''cont'' & ''link'' (see list above) Since there is no official naming convention for these subsequent files, and it is still desirable to see at a glance which ones belong to a continuous piece of audio, a lot of programs apply a numbering scheme to the file suffix: ''.wav, .w01, .w02, ..., .wNN''. Each of those segments is a regular Wave/BWF file, but players that are aware of the continue/link chunk will treat all segments as one single, long piece of audio when opening the first segment ".wav". As an extension,

RF64 {{Infobox file format , name = RF64 , icon = , iconcaption = , icon_size = , screenshot = , screenshot_size = , caption = , _noextcode = , extension = , _nomimecode = , mime = , type_code = , uniform_type = , c ...

is a BWF-compatible multichannel file format enabling file sizes to exceed 4 GB that has been specified in 2006. The axml (additional XML) chunk allows users to incorporate data compliant with the XML format with the audio; the chunk may contain data fragments from one or more schema. In August 2012, the European Broadcasting Union published a specification for embedding

International Standard Recording Code The International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) is an international standard code for uniquely identifying sound recordings and music video recordings. The code was developed by the recording industry in conjunction with the ISO technical commit ...

(ISRC) in the axml chunk of the Broadcast Wave Format. BWF is specified for use in

MXF MXF or mxf may refer to: * Material Exchange Format, a container format for professional digital video and audio media * MXF, the IATA and FAA LID code for Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, United States * mxf, the ISO 639-3 code for Malgbe language ...

SMPTE The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (, rarely ), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the m ...

standard 382. BWF is specified for use in

AES31 AES31 is a standard developed by the Audio Engineering Society for the interchange of digital audio projects between different systems. The primary purpose of the standard is to allow exchange of audio editing projects between digital audio works ...

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See also

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External links