What do the bytes in a .wav file represent?

Question

When I store the data in a .wav file into a byte array, what do these values mean? I\'ve read that they are in two-byte representations, but what exactly is contained in the

Answer 1

The first 44 bytes are commonly a standard RIFF header, as described here: http://tiny.systems/software/soundProgrammer/WavFormatDocs.pdf and here: http://www.topherlee.com/software/pcm-tut-wavformat.html

Apple/OSX/macOS/iOS created .wav files might add an 'FLLR' padding chunk to the header and thus increase the size of the initial header RIFF from 44 bytes to 4k bytes (perhaps for better disk or storage block alignment of the raw sample data).

The rest is very often 16-bit linear PCM in signed 2's-complement little-endian format, representing arbitrarily scaled samples at a rate of 44100 Hz.