WAV

WAV is the main format used on Windows-based system for raw audio.

WAV is a raw (and therefore lossless) format since it uses an uncompressed storage method, which keeps all the samples of an audio track. Therefore professional users or audio experts use the WAV format for best quality audio.

But since the internet has become popular, fewer people use the WAV format to transfer audio files, because WAV files are quite large. People more frequently use some compressed format, such as MP3 or Ogg, to transfer audio, thus achieving a faster file transfer rate over the internet.

The "WAV" format on Macintosh systems is called Au.