A raw audio file is any file containing un- containerized and uncompressed audio. The data is stored as raw

pulse-code modulation Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the amplitud ...

(PCM) values without any metadata header information (such as

sampling rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or s ...

, bit depth, endian, or number of channels).Raw Audio File Formats Information
(at the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

)

Extensions

Raw files can have a wide range of file extensions, common ones being .raw, .pcm, or .sam. 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

{{Reflist Digital audio Computer file formats