Significant characteristics of audio files

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From Florida Digital Archive WAVE preservation Action Plan:

• WAVE exhibits the following significant properties. They are the significant properties which the FDA intends to preserve when adopting migration policy in the future.
  • Content: Duration and number of channels.
  • Context: Title and creating application information.
  • Behavior: N/A
  • Structure: Channel relationship (channel mapping).
  • Appearance (Rendering): Sampling frequency and bit-depth.

These properties are expressed in more detail in the following table (excluding context information, which is not exclusive to audio files):

property value	component	notes
duration	content
number of channels	content	May be expressed as a number or as a description such as "mono", "stereo" or "surround" etc.
channel mapping	structure	For example, in stereo files, a channel number will be linked to either the left or the right ("channelNum="0" mapLocation="LEFT"/channelNum="1" mapLocation="RIGHT")
sampling frequency	rendering	This property may not be preserved through transformation to a preservation format, since conversion to WAV entails the use of a sampling frequency that is used by the WAV format (eg 441000 HZ, 48000 HZ, 96000 HZ). However, the sampling frequency of the preservation format should not be lower than that of the original format.
bit depth	rendering	The bit depth of the preservation format will be 16 bits unless the bit depth of the original format is higher (eg 24 bits).