A RIFF file consists of "chunks," each of which has a four-character type. The format is a special case of RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format), a general-purpose format for packaging data and metadata. While it's primitive compared with other audio file formats, its simplicity has earned it a niche as an archival and editing format. It isn't efficient, but the original intent was to use the format for sound effects of a second or two, not for symphonies. With WAV, each sample is encoded directly as its bit value. Compression could have made files smaller, but it would have put a major computing burden on the processor. IBM and Microsoft wanted to define a format for sound files, and it had to work with the slow processors and limited memory of the time. The WAV file format has been around since 1991.
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