WAV (or WAVE), short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is a variant of the RIFF bit stream format method for storing data in " chunks " , and thus also close to the IFF and the AIFF format used on Macintosh computers. It takes into account some peculiarities of the Intel CPU such as little endian byte order. The RIFF format acts as a " wrapper " for various audio compression codecs.